How you fold a paper airplane can establish how quickly or how far it goes. A lot of people today arrive at the greatest styles via trial, error, and probably a small bit of serendipity. The paper plane can be modeled following the structure of a actual aircraft, or anything like a dart. But this query is no child’s play for engineers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technologies Lausanne (EPFL). 

A new paper out in Scientific Reports this week proposes a rigorous, technical strategy for testing how the folding geometry can effect the trajectory and behavior of these fine flying objects. 

“Outwardly a very simple ‘toy,’ they show complicated aerodynamic behaviors which are most normally overlooked,” the authors create. “When launched, there are resulting complicated physical interactions in between the deformable paper structure and the surrounding fluid [the air] top to a certain flight behavior.”

To dissect the partnership in between a folding pattern and flight, the group created a robotic method that can fabricate, test, analyze, and model the flight behavior of paper planes. This robot paper plane designer (seriously a robot arm fashioned with silicone grippers) can run via this complete approach without the need of human feedback. 

A video of the robot at perform. Obayashi et. al, Scientific Reports

[Related: How to make the world’s best paper airplane]

In this experiment, the bot arm produced and launched more than 500 paper airplanes with 50 distinctive styles. Then it made use of footage from a camera that recorded the flights to get stats on how far every design and style flew and the traits of that flight. 

Flying behaviors with paths mapped. Obayashi et. al, Scientific Reports

For the duration of the study, although the paper planes did not constantly fly the identical, the researchers identified that distinctive shapes could be sorted into 3 broad sorts of “behavioral groups.” Some styles stick to a nose dive path, which as you think about, suggests a quick flight distance just before plunging to the ground. Other individuals did a glide, exactly where it descends at a constant and fairly controlled price, and covers a longer distance than the nose dive. The third sort is a recovery glide, exactly where the paper creation descends steadily just before leveling off and staying at a particular height above the ground.

“Exploiting the precise and automated nature of the robotic setup, big scale experiments can be performed to allow design and style optimization,” the researchers noted. “The robot designer we propose can advance our understanding and exploration of design and style issues that might be very probabilistic, and could otherwise be difficult to observe any trends.”

When they say that the challenge is probabilistic, they are referring to the truth that just about every design and style iteration can differ in flight across distinctive launches. In other words, just since you fold a paper plane the identical way every time does not assure that it is going to fly the precise way. This insight can also apply to the changeable flight paths of compact flying automobiles. “Developing these models can be made use of to accelerate actual-planet robotic optimization of a design—to determine wing shapes that fly a provided distance,” they wrote.