The size of the wing, made of compressed puffed rice, depends on the recipient’s nutrition requirements.

The IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems in Kyoto last week saw an ingenious creation presented by researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne. Their paper described a drone made from rice cakes.

Mind you, this was no light matter. Titled ‘Towards Edible Drones for Rescue Missions: Design and Flight of Nutritional Wings,’ by Bokeon Kwak, Jun Shintake, Lu Zhang, and Dario Floreano from EPFL, the paper detailed a drone that could “boost its payload of food from 30 percent to 50 percent of its mass”, according to a release.