This Drone is Designed to Save Lives Then Disappear

[Narrator] When you think of cardboard,

if you think of it at all, you probably think about boxes,

and all the cool stuff that comes inside.

But what if the box could fly?

That's the idea behind this.

It looks like a pizza box that's been shaped into a wing.

[Narrator] This is the APSARA.

It's a cardboard glider drone that

can carry about two pounds of cargo.

It was developed by Everfly, a division

of San Francisco robotics company, Otherlab.

Here's our prototype, it's a glider

so it just sort of floats through the air.

[Narrator] The plane was developed through

a DARPA project to make a disposable drone

that could be used to precisely deliver

supplies in an emergency situation.

This lets you do something that

you wouldn't otherwise be able to do.

If you had a drone that was more expensive and you wanted

to say bring vaccines to where they were needed,

you would not likely be willing to let that drone

go without being willing to also go

and retrieve it so you could reuse it.

[Narrator] Right now, the prototype planes

are made of good old fashioned corrugated cardboard,

but the final version will be more biodegradable.

These ones are made out of a mushroom based material

and that means that once they arrive where they're needed

they can decompose in a matter of days.

[Narrator] The company thinks they could

be used by disaster relief and humanitarian groups.

Anything from like MSF, Medecins Sans Frontieres,

Red Cross type organizations, any body who needs

to get medical supplies or medically sensitive fluid places,

we love to work with disaster relief organizations as well.

[Narrator] While the drones can't

carry as much as a parachute, they are far more precise

thanks to tiny controls and GPS.

You program in a coordinator and it will

glide to where you want it to be within 50 feet.

[Narrator] Because they will be made of

a cardboard like material, the drones can be

shipped flat and put together where they are needed.

It's a bit of origami like thinking.

We start out with a flat sheet and start to draw

designs that we then laser cut.

This is both laser scored and laser cut

so that when we get the flat sheets out of the

laser cutter, we bend them and fold

them into the wing shape that you see here.

[Narrator] Everfly tested this drone

by dropping one from an OctoCopter,

but the idea would be to deploy hundreds

or even thousands from a cargo plane.

I really enjoy getting to work on something

that can serve a function that is not addressed by any

other technology that we seem to really have so far.