Participate in an automated falling paper experiment
UPDATE: Thank you for your interest and participation in the experiments! We've gather over 350 shapes and conducted over 1000 falling paper experiments so far! As of 28 March, we are no longer conducting experiments and have moved on to data analysis.
Help us gather 1000 creative shapes!
Design a shape that will fall on a target consistently. Help solve the falling paper problem* and maybe win a small prize!
*Background information on the "falling paper problem" belowHow does it work?
Draw your shape on the online form
We will use a robot to cut and drop your shape 3 times
Get feedback on average distance and standard deviation from the target
Progress so far
Background on falling paper research
The "falling paper problem" refers to the centuries-old challenge of predicting the way a flat piece of paper will fall. In the 1850s, a mathematician, James Maxwell, pondered the falling motions of playing cards.
Have you ever seen leaves falling through the air? You'll see that their falling behavior can be hard to predict because many factors like wind and air influence their path. Additionally, not all shapes fall the same way each time. Even though they exhibit seemingly chaotic behaviors, researchers have shown there is interesting underlying physics in their behaviors.
We want to explore a diverse design space unlimited by parameterization. We aim to use robotics and citizen science to shed more light in how shape affects their falling motion.
Interesting research papers on falling paper
Varshney et al., "Unsteady aerodynamic forces and torques on falling parallelograms in coupled tumbling-helical motions", Physical Reviews E. 87 (2013) [PDF]
Howison et al., "Large Scale Automated Investigation of Free-Falling Paper Shapes via Iterative Physical Experimentation", Nature Machine Intelligence (2020) [PDF]
Questions?
Contact: fallingpaper.nana@gmail.com