Drink cup lids inspire a system that could keep drones flying safely

New Atlas | Oct 27, 2022 at 7:28 PM
  • You may have noticed that on some take-away drink cup lids, there are small domes that can be “popped down” to indicate what sort of beverage is in the cup.
  • Working with colleagues from the University of Tennessee, scientists at Indiana’s Purdue University have developed a proof-of-concept model in which a grid of cup-lid-like polyurethane domes is mounted on the top surface of a section of aircraft wing.
  • Making things simpler is the fact that because each dome is either up or down, the data they provide is like the 1s and 0s used in binary computing.