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The progress that’s been made in the field of robotics over the past 50 years is nothing short of remarkable. From Professor Robert Mann’s Boston Arm to Associate Professor Hugh Herr’s bionic limbs,...
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Most robots on a factory floor are fairly ham-handed: Equipped with large pincers or claws, they are designed to perform simple maneuvers, such as grabbing an object, and placing it somewhere else in...
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In the last two decades, prosthetic limb technology has grown by leaps and bounds. Today, the most advanced prostheses incorporate microprocessors that work with onboard gyroscopes, accelerometers,...
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Materials known as conjugated polymers have been seen as very promising candidates for electronics applications, including capacitors, photodiodes, sensors, organic light-emitting diodes, and...
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When graduate student Natasha Wright began her PhD program in mechanical engineering, she had no idea how to remove salt from groundwater to make it more palatable, nor had she ever been to India,...
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It’s an introduction to robotics – for some students, that’s all they need to know to get excited about the popular class that goes by the number 2.12. For a mechanical engineering student, it’s a...
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A condensed version of a story by Courtney Humphries, MIT Technology Review
Uncomfortable shoes. Awkward crutches. Painful artificial limbs. When technology meets biology, the interface is rarely...
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MechE/EECS alumna Helen Greiner (SB ‘89, SM ‘90) is a household name – quite literally.
She’s a co-developer of the famous robot vacuum, the Roomba, and co-founder of the Roomba’s producer, iRobot....
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Albert Wang has had robots on his mind for a long time.
“When I was about four years old,” he recalls, “I dreamt about building a robot vacuum. I remember wandering around the house, while my parents...
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All you have to do is think about it.
Or at least that’s what it would look like to someone watching you use the robotic finger system that PhD student Faye Wu is designing in Professor Harry Asada’s...
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Assistant Professor Alberto Rodriguez led a team in this past May’s Amazon Picking Challenge, winning second place out of 28 entrants for their robot. The challenge, whose judging panel included...
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Anklebot Helps Determine Ankle Stiffness
by David Chandler, MIT News Office
For most healthy bipeds, the act of walking is seldom given a second thought: One foot follows the other, and the rest...
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The image that comes to mind when you hear Professor John Leonard describe his dream of developing a robot that is what he calls “a lifelong learner” is so cinematic it’s almost hard to believe:
“...
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Detailed new field studies, laboratory experiments, and simulations of the largest known “internal waves” in the Earth’s oceans — phenomena that play a key role in mixing ocean waters, greatly...
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How can sustainable consumption in U.S. cities be fostered? Can the ocean floor be mined in an ecologically benign way? What are the health risks associated with the mining of rare metals used in...
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Conduction and thermal radiation are two ways in which heat is transferred from one object to another: Conduction is the process by which heat flows between objects in physical contact, such as a pot...
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In 2007, Steven Keating had his brain scanned out of sheer curiosity.
Keating had joined a research study that included an MRI scan, and he asked that the scan’s raw data be returned to him. The scan...
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Researchers at MIT and Stanford University have developed a new kind of solar cell that combines two different layers of sunlight-absorbing material in order to harvest a broader range of the sun’s...
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Engineering was in Domitilla Del Vecchio’s blood from the very beginning: Growing up in Rome as the daughter of an engineer, she spent long hours of her childhood tinkering and playing in her father’...
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The process of wrinkle formation is familiar to anyone who has ever sat in a bathtub a little too long. But exactly why layered materials sometimes form one kind of wrinkly pattern or another — or...