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Solar-powered Shape-changing Origami Microfliers by Kyle Johnson; Vicente Arroyos; Amélie Ferran; Raul Villanueva; Dennis Yin; Tilboon Elberier; Alberto Aliseda; Sawyer Fuller; Vikram Iyer; Shyamnath Gollakota is a Engineering article available to read on EtoBox.

What is Solar-powered Shape-changing Origami Microfliers about?

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 designed origami microfliers using bistable leaf-out structures and uncovered 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, a Bluetooth radio, a solar power–harvesting circuit, a pressure sensor to estimate altitude, and a temperature sensor. Outdoor evaluations show that our 414-milligram origami microfliers were able to elect

Who reads Solar-powered Shape-changing Origami Microfliers?

Author

Kyle Johnson; Vicente Arroyos; Amélie Ferran; Raul Villanueva; Dennis Yin; Tilboon Elberier; Alberto Aliseda; Sawyer Fuller; Vikram Iyer; Shyamnath Gollakota

Publisher

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

Published

2023

Language

EN

Field

Engineering (Physical Sciences)