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State-of-the-art atomic force microscopes (AFMs) are designed to capture images of structures as small as a fraction of a nanometer — a million times smaller than the width of a human hair. In recent...
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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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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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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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Here’s one way to get kids excited about programming: a "robot garden" with dozens of fast-changing LED lights and more than 100 origami robots that can crawl, swim, and blossom like flowers.
A team...
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Researchers have made great progress in recent years in the design and creation of biological circuits — systems that, like electronic circuits, can take a number of different inputs and deliver a...
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When an aspiring mechanical engineer on a budget wants a top-of-the-line guitar, what does he do? He makes it himself, of course.
At age 13, Nathan Spielberg — now an MIT senior — began building his...
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Last week, at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, MIT researchers unveiled an oval-shaped submersible robot, a little smaller than a football, with a flattened panel on...
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Objects in space tend to spin — and spin in a way that’s totally different from the way they spin on earth. Understanding how objects are spinning, where their centers of mass are, and how their mass...
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Twisting a screwdriver, removing a bottle cap, and peeling a banana are just a few simple tasks that are tricky to pull off single-handedly. Now a new wrist-mounted robot can provide a helping hand...
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Alberto Rodriguez, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, and incoming graduate student Nikhil Chavan-Dafle presented their work on robotic extrinsic dexterity — which they began at...
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Explosions caused by leaking gas pipes under city streets have frequently made headlines in recent years, including one that leveled an apartment building in New York this spring. But while the...
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This year’s arena for the annual robotics competition that caps the mechanical engineering class called 2.007 (Learning by Design) was based on a Winter Olympics theme, with dauntingly steep slopes...
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Suppose you’re trying to navigate an unfamiliar section of a big city, and you’re using a particular cluster of skyscrapers as a reference point. Traffic and one-way streets force you to take some...
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2.678 students present their final projects, autonomous robotics cars, which have to follow an obstacle course. Photo credit: Tony Pulsone
If you had to pick one word to describe the Department of...
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For most healthy bipeds, the act of walking is seldom given a second thought: One foot follows the other, and the rest of the body falls in line, supported by a system of muscle, tendon, and bones....
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Assistant Professors Cullen Buie and Sangbae Kim of the Department of Mechanical Engineering both recently received a DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA), which was granted to 25 tenure-track faculty...
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by Alissa Mallinson
Innovation and creativity are concepts that imbue everything we do in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. They’re woven into every lab, every experiment, every faculty...
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Assistant Professor Sangbae Kim works on his lab’s current bioinspired project, the robotic cheetah.
Photo Credit: M. Scott Brauer
by Alissa Mallinson
MIT’s Department of Mechanical...
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Engineering Light-Activated Muscles
by Jennifer Chu, MIT News Office
Many robotic designs take nature as their muse: sticking to walls like geckos, swimming through water like tuna, sprinting...