The further drones go, the more it might make sense to construct them out of biological materials. A new bio-drone could eventually be able to grow itself in remote locations, and if it gets lost in the wilderness,melt into a harmless puddle.

The shell of the drone is made from a mushroom-like material called mycelium, and cellulose coated with the same protein used to make wasp nests waterproof. Inside, the circuit board is printed with silver. Most of the materials–apart from a few components, like the motor–are biodegradable.





“If it crashes in an environmentally-sensitive place, such as a coral reef, then it can biodegrade and it won’t affect the coral as strongly,” explains Ian Hull, a sophomore at Stanford University, who was part of a large team of students from Brown, Spelman, and Stanford who collaborated with researchers from NASA on the design of the prototype.

“We can also send it into environments where we might not expect it to return,” he says. “If we want to fly it over wildfires to see where it’s spreading, or if there’s a nuclear meltdown and we want to fly in to see what’s going on with the radioactivity, we can send in the drone and it can send back data without returning.”

The mushroom material proved to be well-suited for flying. “Mushroom materials are inherently lightweight, biodegradable, and the strength to weight ratio of the material was preferable for this application,” says Melissa Jacobsen from Ecovative, the company that helped the students make the chassis.





Though the material would naturally biodegrade on its own, the students designed it to self-destruct. “It won’t degrade very quickly unless we give it a set of enzymes that will help break it down further,” says Hull. “Part of our project was making those enzymes that would only trigger upon certain conditions such as impact or time.”