Winged Microchip Is Smallest-ever Human-Made Flying Structure

Inspired by the aerodynamics of wind-dispersed seeds, researchers developed microfliers, which could be broadly dispersed to monitor pollution and airborne disease.

Transcript

00:00:18 And that has the effect of  increasing the dispersal distance   from the tree, and that's the name of the game  is spreading the seeds as far as possible. The goal of this project has been to add  capability for winged flight to electronic circuit   chips with the idea that those capabilities would  allow us to distribute highly functional but   miniaturized electronic devices that could  sense the environment for disease tracking,   population surveillance, maybe monitoring  of environmental contamination and so on.   So the objects that we've created  consist of two parts: One is an electronic   functional component that has an overall  size scale in the range of one millimeter,  so almost like a tiny grain of sand. But  we've integrated with that electronic chip   wing structures that form almost what looks  like a helicopter. And so as these structures  

00:01:33 fall through the air in interaction between  the air and those wings cause a rotational   motion that creates a very stable, slow-falling  velocity that allows these structures to interact   for extended periods with ambient wind that  really enhances the dispersal process much like   seeds do in the biological world. We  think we've beaten biology, in a sense.