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This is the cardboard drone Colvo precision payload delivery system. (photo: corvouas.com.au) Paper airplanes are origami toys that we are all too familiar with. We may already know that there are many scientific principles in this simple origami toy. For example, paper airplanes with different shapes may have different flight performance according to Bernoulli's principle. But you probably don't know that there is more knowledge in paper airplanes, and they can even defeat fighter jets.

(by Mei Lin / tr. by Robert Taylor)

Australian company SYPAQ has made a drone out of cardboard, the Colvo Precision Payload delivery system (Corvo-Precision Payload Delivery System), which is a disposable drone. Although the drone is made of cardboard and can only be used once, it is capable of transportation, reconnaissance, combat and other tasks.

What are the benefits of making drones out of cardboard? You must not think that cardboard drones are more or less the same as the paper airplanes you fold. The cardboard drone is made of foldable foam board. The fuselage and wings can only be used once, but the propulsion module and avionics module can be reused.

One of the advantages of making drones out of cardboard is that it is easy to deploy because it is light. Because the materials are foldable foam boards, these drones can be folded into pizza boxes before deployment, making it easy to store and transport. In deployment, users are like doing things by hand, using common tools such as knives, rubber bands and wrenches, and pizza boxes can be turned into drones in just an hour.

Some people may ask, cardboard is afraid of water, in case it catches a rainy day during flight, the cardboard drone will be rotten. The drone's cardboard is coated with wax and has a certain degree of waterproof performance. In addition, light weight is also one of the reasons for choosing cardboard as a production material. The cardboard drone weighs only 2.4 kilograms and has a wingspan of only 2 meters without any load. Despite its small size, the cardboard drone is a veritable Hercules-it can carry a payload of up to 3kg, more than its own no-load weight.

Not only light, but also invisible? Lightweight is not the whole benefit of cardboard drones. It also has the ability to be invisible because cardboard does not reflect radar waves. Ordinary aircraft (including drones) are made of metal, which contains free electrons that produce electromagnetic effects, so they can "reflect" radar waves. However, the main material of cardboard drones is cardboard. Cardboard is not a conductor, there are no free electrons at all, and it will not produce electromagnetic effect under the irradiation of radar waves, so it will not radiate "reflected radar waves". In other words, cardboard drones are invisible for radar monitoring.

When the radar wave shines on the target surface, the alternating electric field and alternating magnetic field of the radar wave will produce electromagnetic field on the target surface, and then radiate the electromagnetic wave, that is, the reflected radar wave. When the radar antenna receives this reflected wave, it can determine the position, distance, speed and so on of the target. (photo source: NOAA)

With GPS, cardboard drones can position themselves and can fly even if the contact between the drone operator and the drone is disturbed. Moreover, even if the enemy captures the signal of the cardboard drone, the enemy cannot locate the operator based on encryption technology. To some extent, this is also a kind of invisibility, which ensures the safety of our own operators.

Cluster tactics are not easy. If you have seen the Marvel superhero movie Spider-Man: hero Expedition, you may still remember the various illusions created by the villain Mystery in the film. For example, the water element in the battle with Spider-Man in Venice is an illusion created by mysteries using swarms of drones. Integrated large groups of drones that work together do cause a lot of trouble for Spider-Man.

In fact, in reality, clustering also has more advantages for drones, which involves the clustering capability of drones (swarming capability). For drones, clustering means that a large number of drones can be assembled as a whole to complete the task. The UAVs in these clusters are all connected to each other, and if several of them fail to complete the task, other UAVs can be "replaced", which does not affect the overall effectiveness and efficiency of the UAV.

Therefore, the clustering capability of UAV has become a research field concerned by scientists at present, and in the future, the cluster of UAV will make use of artificial intelligence technology.

However, the consumption of drones is also high. Although drones can be operated remotely without causing casualties, slow speed, frequent low-altitude flights and poor defense capabilities make drones the most expensive weapon on the battlefield. For drones such as the RQ-4 Global Hawk in the United States, the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars makes drones an unaffordable "consumable material".

The actual cost of the US RQ-4 Global Hawk drone is more than $100 million. (photo source: Staff Sgt. Christopher Matthews) while the cost of cardboard drones is only a few hundred to thousands of dollars, such a low cost makes the cluster advantage of cardboard drones more than theoretical.

At present, SYPAQ is developing cluster software. Once a breakthrough is made, it may be only a matter of time before cardboard drones replace drones currently used by the armed forces of various countries.

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