EPFL's Collapsable Delivery Drone Protects Your Package With an Origami Cage

Of the many, many (many many many) challenges that are inherent to urban drone delivery, safety is one of the most important. Nobody has a reliable, cost-effective solution for this, although we've seen some unreliable ones (dangling packages on strings) and cumbersome ones (dedicated, protected landing pads), so we've been missing an elegant way of protecting end users from robots that fly with spinning blades of death. EPFL in Switzerland has had a solution for this for years--drones surrounded by protective cages that allow them to bounce off of obstacles. As far as the drones are concerned, humans are obstacles as well, so a protective cage does pretty well at protecting them from us (and vice versa). The annoying thing about these cages has always been that they're all kinds of bulky, especially if they're protecting a quadrotor beefy enough to be useful.