Biodegradable paper airplane may revolutionise humanitarian aid

The paper gliders look almost like stealth fighters, capable of carrying more than two pounds of supplies like blood and vaccines to those in need. And they could totally transform humanitarian aid for people in remote regions. 

The project is part of Otherlab’s Aerial Platform Supporting Autonomous Resupply Actions (APSARA) system, which uses computational design to create low-cost aerial supply vehicles. The APSARA gliders are made from an inexpensive material called mycelium, designed to be aerodynamic and degradable within a matter of days. For the testing stage, however, Otherlab used heavy-duty cardboard as a similar stand-in.

 The gliders can also steer themselves, using off-the-shelf electronics built inside GPS, autopilot, small servomechanisms and a disposable battery. The drones can hold canisters, “medically sensitive fluids” and batteries, delivering lifesaving items to rural areas without roads, or regions rendered inaccessible by natural disasters or war.

“We designed these to be used in areas where existing infrastructure was insufficient to get critical items, blood, medical supplies and so on to where they needed to be,” said Mikell Taylor, Otherlab’s team lead for the project. “We came up with a glider design because it seemed the most efficient for the application,” she said.

Here’s how it work:

An aircraft lifts an APSARA glider into the air and transports it to a planned location. Factoring in wind and other data, it then drops the paper drone so it glides down in a spiral motion, hitting a preset GPS spot within a 33-foot radius.

 People can then unpack the supplies, and the paper airplane will disappear after time due to its mycelium frame, which is a flexible, cellulose-based material. That ensures these kinds of humanitarian missions wouldn’t leave the ground littered with cardboard. 

Otherlab offered the concept of a C-17 or C-130 cargo plane carrying hundreds of the gliders pre-programmed with delivery coordinates. The team predicts such an operation, illustrated below, could easily deliver medical supplies to an area the size of California. 

Similar efforts already exist, but most autonomous supply vehicles have limitations, such as high cost and a lack of ways to recover them after they’re deployed. Regular drones often crash, vehicles running on heavy batteries can’t carry as much cargo, and supplies airdropped by parachute can drift in the wind, end up in the middle of a lake or ocean, or even get intercepted by other people.