SkyCone: Award-Winning Drone Concept Folds Itself Into a Traffic Cone

A student team from the Beijing Institute of Technology has designed a drone that flies to a highway incident, lands, and folds itself into a traffic cone. The concept, called SkyCone, won the Conceptual Industrial Product Design category at the 2026 European Product Design Award, a global open-entry program run by Farmani Group.

Xinhao Guo led the team, which included Songyan Pan, Zixu Zhang, and Wanzheng Liu. Their premise is simple: keep workers out of live lanes. The team cites a figure that 57% of frontline highway personnel consider manual cone placement their most dangerous task.

How does the drone become a cone?

SkyCone flies as an X-shaped quadcopter. Each of its four arms — the team calls them Triangular Prism Buckets — is a hollow orange wedge housing a ducted propeller. After landing, the arms tilt upward and lock together at red magnetic tips with built-in indicator lights, forming a four-sided pyramid with the familiar orange and white stripes.

A square central hub carries a downward-facing camera on a gimbal, plus an LED strip and a non-slip mat on its underside. Reflective strips trace the arm edges. One detail is pure graphic logic: the white bands sit on the faces that point outward after folding, so the drone only reads as a cone once it actually is one.

Why the cone itself hasn't changed

Charles D. Scanlon, a Los Angeles street painter, invented the modern traffic cone to keep cars off his wet paint, using rubber and fabric salvaged from old tires. His patent was granted in November 1943, and Interstate Rubber Products began manufacturing the design in 1947. The cone eventually entered the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, the federal traffic-control manual.

Eight decades later, materials and reflective collars have evolved, but the silhouette hasn't. SkyCone keeps the recognizable shape and changes only how the cone gets into position — a sensible move for an object drivers need to identify fast.

What's the safety math?

Cone placement is still manual work: crews ride the back of a slow-moving truck or walk beside it, setting cones a few feet from passing traffic. The US recorded 850 work zone deaths in 2024 — more than two a day. In March 2023, a single crash on I-695 outside Baltimore killed six roadway workers.

The team frames the first minutes of an emergency call as the most critical stretch, when crews are most exposed. A drone fleet that positions cones before anyone leaves the truck could shrink that exposure window.

Hasn't automation already tried this?

Yes, but every existing system depends on a vehicle. Brisbane-based Arrowes built an Automated Cone Truck that drops a cone every five seconds; on Melbourne's Eastern Freeway it handled 65,000 cones and cut worker exposure to live traffic by roughly 500 hours. Caltrans and UC Davis developed a cab-operated cone machine in the 2000s, and Spain's Sacyr and GMV prototyped a self-driving trailer with an AI-guided robotic arm.

SkyCone's twist is making each cone responsible for its own delivery. Chris Chang's Apiece project showed in 2022 that a cone could be assembled from flat triangles; SkyCone essentially gives those triangles propellers.

The team's renders show the drone at a nighttime highway repair, an incident scene behind an arrow-board truck, a mountain-road rockfall, a snowed-over highway, and the crumbling edge of an open-pit mine. It sits in a lineage of highway concepts — the Highway Patrol Drone, designed to fly to crash scenes from light towers, and the Median AMB, which proposed riding the road divider like a monorail — but its role is marking off the scene rather than responding.

The award recognizes a design proposal, not proven roadside performance. Whether SkyCone can reliably self-deploy beside live traffic is exactly what remains to be demonstrated.