Legal but sick? Edible drones deliver food directly to trapped people

This drone can eat!

When rescuing trapped people, drones can be used to transport food and water.

However, small UAVs generally have small payloads. Most carrier UAVs can only carry 30% of their mass as payload, and most of the remaining mass belongs to the fuselage, such as wings. .

At the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) held in Kyoto last week, researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) submitted a paper and developed an unmanned robot. Machine can effectively solve this problem.

How is this done?

It’s very simple. Use edible food as the wings of the drone. This can increase the payload of the food from 30% to 50% of the mass.

Let’s take a look at what this edible drone is all about!

Unrecoverable Drones

Let’s first take a look at the title of this article - "Edible Drones for Rescue Missions: Design and Flight of Nutritious Wings" , very straightforwardly, the wings of this drone are edible, and the purpose is to drop food. The authors are Bokeon Kwak, Jun Shinto, Lu Zhang and Dario Floreano from EPFL.

Paper address:

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​https://www.php.cn/link/4dbf29d90d5780cab50897fb955e4373​​

The reason drones like this exist is to deliver food effectively and efficiently to people who, for one reason or another, really, really need food and can't get it any other way.

Obviously though, the drone would never be able to fly back because its wings would be eaten, but that's a small price to pay as it might be delivering vital calories to maintain a certain human life.

Researchers designed this partially edible drone wing, which is made from compressed and puffed rice (also known as rice crackers or rice cakes) cake), this food is similar to expanded polypropylene (EPP foam), a material commonly used in drone wings, because it is strong and lightweight, and puffed rice also happens to have these properties.

While not as strong as EPP, Rice Krispies are inexpensive, easy to use, and easy to laser cut.

The calorie density of puffed rice is also considerable - rice cakes have a calorie content of 3870 kcal per kilogram, which is not as good as foods like chocolate, but about the same as pasta, but much lower density.

The rice cakes are round when they are first made, so the first step in making the wings is to use a laser to cut them into hexagonal shapes to make them easier to stick together.

The glue is just gelatin, and after it's all dried, the wing is wrapped in plastic and glue to ensure it won't break down in wet or damp conditions, it's a quick, easy, and cheap process.

Wings made according to nutritional requirements taste like cookies

The size of the wing is not actually determined by flight requirements; Determined by nutritional requirements.

In this case, a wingspan of about 70 centimeters would produce enough rice crackers and gelatin to provide roughly 300 kcal, or the equivalent of a breakfast, and 80 grams of Vitamins or water or something like that. The rest of the drone's structure and tail surfaces are made of carbon fiber and foam.

Although it's just a prototype, this semi-edible drone can actually fly, and by adding a motor, some servo drives to control the tail surface and a small battery, it can reach speeds of 10 meters per second .

The next step, the researchers say, is to find a way to replace as many of the drone's inedible parts as possible with edible materials while also finding a way to method, carrying other nutrient loads (such as water) in the edible portion.

So what does this edible drone taste like?

The edible wing tastes like a crispy rice cookie with a bit of raw gelatin inside and no artificial flavors so far, said Kwak, the paper's author.

It’s just that this thin rice cake doesn’t seem to be enough to eat. One meal of Digest Mushroom is probably not enough. I strongly recommend that it be designed as a double-layered wing in the future.

Increase the quantity without increasing the price, just in the crazy week X...

Related reports:

​​https://www.php.cn/link/ec3ba9232ae8f48d46b4f6a5283e496f​​

​​https://www.php.cn/link/4dbf29d90d5780cab50897fb955e4373​​

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