I hope the paper and cardboard construction they mention is feasible for commercial use. Otherwise I'm picturing a future where drone deliveries are commonplace and these plastic parachutes litter our streets and waterways.
This is really cool and innovative thinking, but anything aerodynamic does not scale linearly. It's really easy to make something light fall slowly. Baby spiders use "ballooning" -- a single thread -- to fall so slowly that they can travel far in thermal updrafts.
What's missing here is any evidence that the same cool parachutes will work on anything of significant mass, e.g. a parcel weighing 2kg or an average human weighing 80kg.
Depending on the use case, a hot-air balloon sized parachute to safely drop a person might be perfectly acceptable.
It looks like adding flexible ailerons or whatever they'd be called could give a big advantage in precision landing, with slower forward/sideways speeds but much better control.
Making it modular, with interlocking but separate parts, might make great sense for repairability and safety for skydiving? From the little I know of the sport, things tend to fail catastrophically, going from perfect condition to total disaster without a whole lot of graduated steps in between. I also wonder if there's some utility in paramotoring - multiple kirigami stabilizers, maybe, with a central parafoil, or one big kirigami rig with the fan blowing straight up its skirt?
This is awesome research. Paper drone-delivery parachutes are definitely a use case, but maybe some of the more dangerous flying sports could be made much safer, as well.
edit: Apparently no, 100 meter radius kirigami chute would be needed for a single person parachute, not exactly practical. Apparently it's just really, really good at ensuring things drop straight down with a lot of drag.
Spider ballooning is an interesting phenomena. I also assumed that the spider is just falling a bit slower than the air is rising, due to convection. However some people think there is also a strong electrostatic component to spider ballooning. I'm not sure how that works once the spider is well clear of the ground though.
The tested it with a standard size waterbottle, so you know it works fine for 0.8 kg paloads.
>> does not scale linearly
It looks like it depends on the stiffness of the material (paper), so scaling it up to human (or bigger) sized will come with "interesting" challenges :(
The journal Nature (where the original article was published) has a video about that parachute:
I had to wonder if Nature (the Mother, not the journal) had first created anything similar, because she always does.
One answer is a dandelion seed. Not exactly the same, but a dandelion seed is about 85%+ "porous" - the pores here being the space between the spindles, not actual holes per se. And it turns out that high porosity is critical to stabilizing the wake turbulence not unlike what is described in the Nature video. https://sites.nd.edu/biomechanics-in-the-wild/2021/06/01/inn...
A learning that kirigami parachute researches might apply: The dandelion pappus is less porous near the center and becomes more porous toward the outer edge. A lower porosity near the central hub can increase shear flow, helping to detach and strengthen the vortex
Furthermore, spiders which have been known to "balloon" on the wind even across entire oceans use multiple strands of silk which are negatively charged to repel each other, thus forming some of the same gaps that are seen in a dandelion pappus, with similar aerodynamic benefits. https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.105.0...
The fine article mentions this, including mentioning dandelion seeds specifically:
> As well as kirigami, the team drew inspiration from nature. Instead of relying on a gliding angle, many wind-dispersed seeds are equipped with structures that stabilize the airflow around them: including the feathery bristles of dandelion seeds, which create a stabilized vortex in their wake.Is that really Nature's channel? It sucks that I have to ask, but I just ran across that video (and channel) on the weekend. I have a new policy where I don't trust videos to not be AI slop when they don't have a real, on screen presenter. This one didn't, but it also didn't really feel like AI slop, but it could have been stolen content since that is very common nowadays because it goes unpunished.
Insane how much precision our modern world needs for people to be happy.
Linked paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09515-9.epdf
Modern parachutes can be packed relatively small and open quite quickly. Not sure how you would pack one of these parachutes, especially if they are made from a relatively stiff plastic.
It comes as a flat disc. For some applications that might be more convenient packaging than traditional parachutes.
And then you could roll the flat disc into a tube.
This looks perfect for bomblets. I imagine the Ukrainians are already stamping these out of plastic somewhere.
Why would you want to make a bomblet fall more slowly (allowing the intended targets to escape)? They already have fins to maintain their approximate direction.
Regretting my choice to do a PhD in CS instead of whatever this cool thing is…
your PhD probably gives you the wherewithal to do the cool things now or after a few years of work ...
I mean, sure, it does, but I could have had a PhD in folding pieces of paper!
*cutting
Krigami is about folding and cutting - this looks like cutting only, though it kind of folds due to air drag
Applied topology and fluid dynamics + origami? Pretty sure there’s no program for this so you can just show up.
Also I bet they really need people who can help with the simulations. If you email the authors you can probably get added to the team.
I too love this. It’s that intersection of devilishly hard and almost useless unless you squint then it’s sci-fi magic tech. There are quite a few cases where you want the parachute to drop straight down.
> When dropping a payload from a drone or aircraft, this gliding angle means parachutes will often drift far from their intended targets. This can be especially frustrating and potentially dangerous for operations such as humanitarian aid delivery, where precisely targeted airdrops are often vital to success.
I could't help but roll my eyes at this textbook example of describing new technology as being "useful for humanitarian or search & rescue work", instead of the much more obvious usefulness in military applications.
Who's kidding who about what "precisely targeted airdrops" are most likely to be used for? These will be in use by Ukraine well before anything beyond a technology demo drops on to a "stranded hiker" in a National Park...
I thought the same at first, but actually - you don't want your bombs to fall slowly. Supply drops are another matter. These don't kill people directly at least.
This looks like a good way if not only ensuring that things fall slowly, but also ensuring that they fall in the proper orientation. Gravity bombs typically use fins at the back for this purpose, but that makes them actually turn into the wind by pushing the back of the bomb in the direction of the wind. Smaller fins combined with some drag provided by such a parachute as this, could help gravity bombs be more resistant to winds, while ensuring that the fuse stays pointed down.
You do when you're flying low and you need to escape the munition's effective radius.
Retarded bombs are slowed with a variety of mechanisms, from spring-loaded airbrakes to inflatable ballutes to parachutes. Fuzing can range from superquick for conventional bombs to extended timers for nuclear weapons, all depending upon the application. These parachutes would be great for low flying drone bombers as well as munitions that are highly attitude-sensitive (such as those with improvised fuzes).
Related work that his lab was doing when I got to take a seminar with him at IU: https://gwern.net/doc/design/typography/1993-mcgraw.pdf
Gary was one of the TAs in the class. The non-reducibility of letterforms has remained a fascination—I always did like the (computational) linguistics corner of cognitive science!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45495711 - I think you meant to comment on this one.
now swoop it!