From Dandelions to Dandidrones

We are developing swarms of dandelion-inspired drones, dandidrones, that are passively transported and distributed by the wind and scavenge energy from the wind to remain afloat. They will autonomously undertake complex coordinated tasks such as following concentrations of chemical agents, ensuring ad-hoc resolution and coverage. Each dandidrone will bioresorb, removing the need to be retrieved. In this talk, I will present our progress in developing this technology, and I will discuss the underpinning aerodynamics. We will start from the aerodynamics underlying the flights of the dandelion seed and move to the physical, numerical and theoretical models that describe its flight. We will show that dandelions and dandidrones can be described by permeable disks whose aerodynamics is governed by the Reynolds, Galilei and Darcy numbers. We will further simplify the model to two-dimensional plates, for which numerical simulations of the Navier-Stokes equations can be performed at a moderate computational cost. The simulations will reveal the energy harvesting mechanisms and how horizontal gusts can uplift free-falling bodies. Finally, we will provide an overview of current and future work and of the research questions that still remain to be addressed to enable this technology.

This research received funds from the ERC Consolidator Grant H2020 ERC-2020-COG 101001499; ARIA Scoping Our Planet; and the Leverhulme Trust grant RPG-2015-255.