VOICE OVER: This is a falling seed.
And this is a tiny electronic device.
JOHN ROGERS: The goal of this project has been to add capability for winged flight to electronic circuit chips.
VOICE OVER: Using seeds as inspiration, researchers have designed tiny electronics that fall slowly through the air, thousands of which could be distributed over a huge area.
JOHN: For purposes such as environmental monitoring, maybe tracking the development of a chemical spill, tracking population movements, maybe disease tracking, things that could happen with tiny devices that are communicating with one another wirelessly in sort of a coordinated manner.
VOICE OVER: John Rogers and his team started out studying the aerodynamics of seeds.
JOHN: Cottonwood seeds, maple seeds, that have developed over the course of billions of years very sophisticated principles in aerodynamics, and we've been able to adapt those ideas, apply them to man-made electronic circuit platforms. VOICE OVER:The spinning of the seeds stabilises them and slows their fall, allowing them to spread further from the tree.
The team adapted these aerodynamics for their electronic devices.
JOHN: We use laser projection methods to understand how to create wings and the attack angles and the number of wings and the geometries and the weight distributions to fully optimise the way that these structures are flying.
VOICE OVER: So how do these tiny devices compare to the seeds that inspired them?
