Exploring high-performance wooden drone structures through speculative design

Abstract

Although we aspire to make decisions based on logic and systematic analysis, it has been argued that engineers’ technical decisions can be influenced by their ideologies about progress and the future - including the material selection process. In this work, we address this potential influence through a holistic and exploratory speculative design process, asking ”what are some implications of the use of wood in high-performance drone structures, and what will a high-performance wooden drone structure look like?” A wooden prototype search and rescue drone, developed for use in Denmark, is built, tested and analyzed through quantitative and qualitative means as part of the exploration process. We find that wood offers unique features including lower toxicity during manufacturing and increased environmental sustainability. In addition, when properly designed a wooden drone structure has a significantly higher stiffness to weight ratio ($8.8 \ast10^{6}$) compared to a typical non-optimized carbon fiber and epoxy composite plate ($7.6 \ast10^{4}$) or tube ($1.1 \ast10^{6}$). Historical examples are utilized which suggest that actual material performance may be less important than the ideologies of progress surrounding the material, and hence that engineers may not always make decisions based purely on performance. Thus, here speculative design is used not only as a way to explore the material ”path less traveled”, but also as an approach to examine the legitimacy of wood as a structural drone material - and more broadly, to discuss the role ideologies play in modern engineering practice.