An interdisciplinary team of researchers consisting out of civil and environmental engineers, mathematicians, biomedical engineers and musical composers from MIT, Tuffs University and Boston University, cooperated in order to develop a novel method that can be used to synthesize new variants on silk’s natural structure as well as for making further improvements in the synthetic… »

Inspired by earthworms, snails and sea cucumbers, which use the muscles along their bodies to creep along the ground by alternately squeezing and stretching them in a mechanism called peristalsis, researchers at MIT, Harvard University, and Seoul National University, have engineered Meshworm – a soft autonomous robot that crawls across surfaces by contracting segments of… »

After deciding to switch from autonomous helicopters to a fixed-wing vehicle, MIT Robust Robotics Group researchers have completed a series of flight tests in which an autonomous robotic plane successfully threaded its way among pillars in the parking garage without the use of GPS information. The state-estimation algorithm developed for this purpose relies on other… »

Holograms – most of us want them in our homes, but we still can’t have them. As an alternative and more feasible solution, MIT Media Lab’s Camera Culture group devised a multiple-perspective, glasses-free 3D display technology they named Tensor Display. Instead of the complex hardware required to produce holograms, the system developed by the Media… »

Most efforts to harness multiple energy sources so far have employed switching to the source which provides most energy at that moment, but a group of researchers at MIT developed a system able to combine energy from multiple sources by switching rapidly between them. The  system could to be used in new battery-free monitoring systems… »

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania have developed an innovative solution that allows creation of 3D printed templates of filament networks which can be used to rapidly create vasculature and improve the function of engineered living tissues. Unlike other approaches which involve 3D printing in layers, Penn researchers decided to accelerate this delicate process and… »

MIT engineers have developed a fuel cell that runs on the same sugar that powers human cells – glucose. Although the technology has been around since 1970s, MIT fuel cell is fabricated from silicon, using the same technology used to make semiconductor electronic chips. This feature allows it to be integrated with other circuits that… »

Aside making enemies out of robots, science fiction also depicts them as our helpers. While most of the robots in use today are used to help us in manufacture, explore or entertain us, various research groups around the world are developing algorithms and models of robots which can be safely used along humans by performing… »