Meshes made from fibers with nanometer-scale diameters have a wide range of potential applications, including tissue engineering, water filtration, solar cells, and even body armor. But their commercialization has been hampered by inefficient manufacturing techniques. In the latest issue of the journal Nanotechnology, MIT researchers describe a new device for producing nanofiber meshes, which matches […]
New Software Lets Your Car Tell You What It Needs
Imagine hopping into a ride-share car, glancing at your smartphone, and telling the driver that the car’s left front tire needs air, its air filter should be replaced next week, and its engine needs two new spark plugs. Within the next year or two, people may be able to get that kind of diagnostic information […]
Teleoperating Robots With Virtual Reality: Making it Easier For Factory Workers To Telecommute
Many manufacturing jobs require a physical presence to operate machinery. But what if such jobs could be done remotely? This week researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) presented a virtual-reality (VR) system that lets you teleoperate a robot using an Oculus Rift headset. The system embeds the user in a VR […]
Fast-Moving Magnetic Particles Could Enable New Form of Data Storage
New research has shown that an exotic kind of magnetic behavior discovered just a few years ago holds great promise as a way of storing data — one that could overcome fundamental limits that might otherwise be signaling the end of “Moore’s Law,” which describes the ongoing improvements in computation and data storage over recent […]
Robot Learns To Follow Orders Like Alexa
Despite what you might see in movies, today’s robots are still very limited in what they can do. They can be great for many repetitive tasks, but their inability to understand the nuances of human language makes them mostly useless for more complicated requests. For example, if you put a specific tool in a toolbox […]
New Robot Rolls With the Rules of Pedestrian Conduct
Just as drivers observe the rules of the road, most pedestrians follow certain social codes when navigating a hallway or a crowded thoroughfare: Keep to the right, pass on the left, maintain a respectable berth, and be ready to weave or change course to avoid oncoming obstacles while keeping up a steady walking pace. Now […]
Drones Relay RFID Signals for Inventory Control
Radio frequency ID tags were supposed to revolutionize supply chain management. The dirt-cheap, battery-free tags, which receive power wirelessly from scanners and then broadcast identifying numbers, enable warehouse managers to log inventory much more efficiently than they could by reading box numbers and recording them manually. But the scale of modern retail operations makes even […]
Designing Custom Robots in a Matter of Minutes
Even as robots become increasingly common across different parts of our world, they remain incredibly difficult to make. From designing and modeling to fabricating and testing, the process is slow and costly: even one small change can mean days or weeks of rethinking and revising important hardware. But what if there was a way to […]
Software Lets Designers Exploit The Extremely High Resolution Of 3-D Printers
Today’s 3-D printers have a resolution of 600 dots per inch, which means that they could pack a billion tiny cubes of different materials into a volume that measures just 1.67 cubic inches. Such precise control of printed objects’ microstructure gives designers commensurate control of the objects’ physical properties — such as their density or […]
System Automatically Retouches Cellphone Images In Real-Time
The data captured by today’s digital cameras is often treated as the raw material of a final image. Before uploading pictures to social networking sites, even casual cellphone photographers might spend a minute or two balancing color and tuning contrast, with one of the many popular image-processing programs now available. This week at Siggraph, the […]