Solar-powered shape-changing origami microfliers
Kyle Johnson, Vicente Arroyos, Am\'elie Ferran, Tilboon Elberier, Raul, Villanueva, Dennis Yin, Alberto Aliseda, Sawyer Fuller, Vikram Iyer,, Shyamnath Gollakota

TL;DR
This paper introduces solar-powered, shape-changing origami microfliers that can alter their descent behavior mid-air to optimize dispersal distance and wirelessly transmit data, enabling large-scale sensor deployment without batteries.
Contribution
It presents a novel design of battery-free, shape-changing origami microfliers with integrated electronics and demonstrates their effective outdoor deployment and data transmission capabilities.
Findings
Microfliers can change shape mid-air to control descent behavior.
They can travel up to 98 meters in light breeze.
They wirelessly transmit data up to 60 meters using solar power.
Abstract
Using wind to disperse microfliers that fall like seeds and leaves can help automate large-scale sensor deployments. Here, we present battery-free microfliers that can change shape in mid-air to vary their dispersal distance. We design origami microfliers using bi-stable leaf-out structures and uncover an important property: a simple change in the shape of these origami structures causes two dramatically different falling behaviors. When unfolded and flat, the microfliers exhibit a tumbling behavior that increases lateral displacement in the wind. When folded inward, their orientation is stabilized, resulting in a downward descent that is less influenced by wind. To electronically transition between these two shapes, we designed a low-power electromagnetic actuator that produces peak forces of up to 200 millinewtons within 25 milliseconds while powered by solar cells. We fabricated a…
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