"Our goal was to add a winged flight to small-scale electronic systems, with the idea that these capabilities would allow us to distribute highly functional, miniaturised electronic devices to sense the environment for contamination monitoring, population surveillance, or disease tracking. Over the course of billions of years, nature has designed seeds with very sophisticated aerodynamics. We borrowed those design concepts, adapted them, and applied them to electronic circuit platforms", said Northwestern's John A. Rogers, who led the device's development.
"We think that we beat nature. At least in the narrow sense that we have been able to build structures that fall with more stable trajectories and at slower terminal velocities than equivalent seeds that you would see from plants or trees. Device miniaturisation represents the dominating development trajectory in the electronics industry, where sensors, radios, batteries, and other components can be constructed in ever smaller dimensions", Rogers said.