Built From Rice Cakes and Gelatin, This Edible Drone Delivers Its Wings as Emergency Food
Built using hexagonal laser-cut blocks of rice cake, the wings of this drone delivery a breakfast's worth of largely-flavorless calories.
A team of researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) have developed a drone you can literally eat — providing you enjoy the flavor of plain rice cakes and gelatin.
Presented at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Systems (IROS), the partially-edible drone isn't just a joke creation. The team set about building something, which could be deployed in a rescue mission, delivering much-needed calories where traditional or heavier vehicles would be ill-suited. The solution: building the drone — or, at least its wings — out of food.
Inspired by how close the texture and appearance of rice cakes and packing foam are — as anyone on a diet will tell you — the team laser-cut round rice cakes into hexagons and "glued" them together with gelatin. The hexagons are then formed into the shape of a wing, with a layer of inedible plastic wrap and tape added to protect the dry cakes from absorbing water and falling apart — while providing a way to bring the baby-feeding game of "here comes the airplane, open wide" to life.
The team's paper, Towards Edible Drones for Rescue Missions: esign and Flight of Nutritional Wings, has not yet been made publicly available; more information is available eaking to IEEE Spectrum, lead author Bokeon Kwak admitted that the drone is more of an emergency ration than a tasty treat: "The edible wing tastes like a crunchy rice crisp cookie with a little touch of raw gelatin," he says, "[as] no artificial flavor has been added yet."
The team's paper, Towards Edible Drones for Rescue Missions: design and Flight of Nutritional Wings, has not yet been made publicly available; more information is available in IEEE Spectrum's coverage.