Towards edible drones for rescue missions: design and flight of nutritional wings

TL;DR

This paper introduces an innovative edible drone with biodegradable wings designed for rescue missions, significantly increasing payload capacity and reducing environmental waste, validated through a functional prototype.

Contribution

It presents a novel edible drone design with scalable edible wings that enhances payload capacity and environmental sustainability in emergency rescue operations.

Findings

Achieved a drone payload of 80 g of water and 300 kcal capacity.

Developed a scalable design for edible wings using specific materials.

Validated flight capability of the edible drone prototype.

Abstract

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 % - 30 % of their own 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 %, owing to its edible wings. Furthermore, should the edible drone 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.