Towards edible drones for rescue missions: design and flight of nutritional wings
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Drones have shown to be useful aerial vehicles for unmanned transport missions such as food and medical supply delivery. This can be leveraged to deliver life-saving nutrition and medicine for people in emergency situations. However, commercial drones can generally only carry 10 mass as payload, which limits the amount of food delivery in a single flight. One novel solution to noticeably increase the food-carrying ratio of a drone, is recreating some structures of a drone, such as the wings, with edible materials. We thus propose a drone, which is no longer only a food transporting aircraft, but itself is partially edible, increasing its food-carrying mass ratio to 50 be left behind in the environment after performing its task in an emergency situation, it will be more biodegradable than its non-edible counterpart, leaving less waste in the environment. Here we describe the choice of materials and scalable design of edible wings, and validate the method in a flight-capable prototype that can provide 300 kcal and carry a payload of 80 g of water.
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