Do you know there are 250 sets of autonomous Starship delivery robots already operating on the streets? (according to The Verge) The human delivery system is not as efficient as it could be. But a robot can be more productive and precise. People buy stuff online, but sometimes it doesn’t arrive on time, and the quality compared to the price is unworthy.
This is why humans created an autonomous robot delivery system. For example, a famous American online shopping company has developed an independent drone delivery system; which is called Prime Air. Their first successful drone delivery was on December 7, 2016. This proves that it is possible.

My team and I are going to design a product that can deliver small electronics from smartphones to iPad minis. We promise to our customers that there will be no damage to the order, so it needs to have a soft landing. And the dropping accuracy must be inside a radius of 30 centimeters. To have a precise drop and a soft landing. We need to decrease the velocity of the falling object to around 3-5 meters per second. So, our team DJBT came up with a solution; we are going to design a parachute my responsibility in the group is to research for the right size of parachute for a product that is approximately 400 grams.

The final chute must fulfill our criteria. I have been researching and taking notes down on the question of how the size of a parachute affects the air resistance of the free-falling object; this is the research question my partner and I have been investigating on for days. This are some of the notes I wrote down: because of air resistance, and more friction will be formed. The more area contacting air molecules; the more air resistance will be created. Also, according to the UCSB Science line; the size of the parachute affects the speed of falling by displacing more air; causing it to fall slowly. Giant parachute will displace or push against more air, which will slow down a falling object.

Before we design an appropriate parachute for our product. We need to know the maximum speed of a vertical free-falling object. And this is the purpose of Drop 0. We first recorded the whole process of the free-falling box; then, we put it in an app called Logger Pro. We analyzed the maximum vertical free-falling speed, then calculate all the other relevant collections of data – median;  average, and etc. Last we put it into our data table.

      Here is the data we collected on Drop 0:
Average speed: 4.7065 m/s
Terminal speed: 9.152181504 m/s
Slowest speed: 0 m/s
Bounces: 1
Time was taken to hit the ground: 0.768 sec
Time was taken for the box to settle: 0.901 sec
Accuracy: landed in a radius of 30 cm
Collision side: bottom side

Landed side: Left side

Later on, when we build out the parachute, we can compare the data to see if the speed decreased. The second step of this project is to put all of our research information together and design parachute that can decrease the velocity to3-5 meters per second.