• May. 9, 2014
    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...
  • Apr. 4, 2014
    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...
  • Dec. 10, 2013
    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...
  • Oct. 24, 2013
    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....
  • Sep. 17, 2013
    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...
  • Jun. 26, 2013
      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...
  • Dec. 10, 2012
    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...
  • Dec. 10, 2012
    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...
  • Dec. 10, 2012
    The Micro Mass Spectrometer   by Alissa Mallinson   Photo credit: Tony Pulsone Professor Ian W. Hunter sat down with us recently to discuss one of his newest inventions, a miniature (“micro”)...
  • Dec. 5, 2011
    Tiny robots may monitor underground pipes for radioactive leaks.   A spherical robot equipped with a camera may navigate underground pipes of a nuclear reactor by propelling itself with an internal...
  • Dec. 5, 2011
      Domitilla Del Vecchio works on intelligent transportation systems that communicate to prevent collisions. What areas does your research focus on? Broadly speaking, my group works in control...

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