In 2018, researchers at MIT and the auto manufacturer BMW were testing ways in which humans and robots might work in close proximity to assemble car parts. In a replica of a factory floor setting, the team rigged up a robot on rails, designed to deliver parts between work stations. Meanwhile, human workers crossed its […]
Robots Shoot for the Moon in MIT’s Annual 2.007 Competition
In their historic lunar mission 50 years ago, Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong collected and returned to Earth more than 48 pounds of lunar material, including 50 moon rocks that researchers have been analyzing intensely ever since. If they’d only had help from some MIT robots, the astronauts might have been able […]
Mini Cheetah Is the First Four-Legged Robot to Do a Backflip
MIT’s new mini cheetah robot is springy and light on its feet, with a range of motion that rivals a champion gymnast. The four-legged powerpack can bend and swing its legs wide, enabling it to walk either right-side up or upside down. The robot can also trot over uneven terrain about twice as fast as […]
MIT Robot Combines Vision and Touch to Learn the Game of Jenga
In the basement of MIT’s Building 3, a robot is carefully contemplating its next move. It gently pokes at a tower of blocks, looking for the best block to extract without toppling the tower, in a solitary, slow-moving, yet surprisingly agile game of Jenga. The robot, developed by MIT engineers, is equipped with a soft-pronged […]
Low-Cost Prosthetic Foot Mimics Natural Walking
Prosthetic limb technology has advanced by leaps and bounds, giving amputees a range of bionic options, including artificial knees controlled by microchips, sensor-laden feet driven by artificial intelligence, and robotic hands that a user can manipulate with her mind. But such high-tech designs can cost tens of thousands of dollars, making them unattainable for many […]
Chip Upgrade Helps Miniature Drones Navigate
Researchers at MIT, who last year designed a tiny computer chip tailored to help honeybee-sized drones navigate, have now shrunk their chip design even further, in both size and power consumption. The team, co-led by Vivienne Sze, associate professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), and Sertac Karaman, the Class of 1948 Career […]
MIT Engineers Build Smart Power Outlet
Have you ever plugged in a vacuum cleaner, only to have it turn off without warning before the job is done? Or perhaps your desk lamp works fine, until you turn on the air conditioner that’s plugged into the same power strip. These interruptions are likely “nuisance trips,” in which a detector installed behind the […]
Keeping Data Fresh For Wireless Networks
For wireless networks that share time-sensitive information on the fly, it’s not enough to transmit data quickly. That data also need to be fresh. Consider the many sensors in your car. While it may take less than a second for most sensors to transmit a data packet to a central processor, the age of that […]
Physicists Discover New Quantum Electronic Material
A motif of Japanese basketweaving known as the kagome pattern has preoccupied physicists for decades. Kagome baskets are typically made from strips of bamboo woven into a highly symmetrical pattern of interlaced, corner-sharing triangles. If a metal or other conductive material could be made to resemble such a kagome pattern at the atomic scale, with […]
Engineers Design Artificial Synapse For “Brain-On-A-Chip” Hardware
When it comes to processing power, the human brain just can’t be beat. Packed within the squishy, football-sized organ are somewhere around 100 billion neurons. At any given moment, a single neuron can relay instructions to thousands of other neurons via synapses — the spaces between neurons, across which neurotransmitters are exchanged. There are more […]