Solar-powered shape-changing origami microfliers

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 circuit directly on the folded origami structure that includes a programmable microcontroller, Bluetooth radio, solar power harvesting circuit, a pressure sensor to estimate altitude and a temperature sensor. Outdoor evaluations show that our 414 milligram origami microfliers are able to electronically change their shape mid-air, travel up to 98 meters in a light breeze, and wirelessly transmit data via Bluetooth up to 60 meters away, using only power collected from the sun.