Participate in an automated falling paper experiment

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.

• 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]