News by Subject Technology & Engineering

Army-funded research identified a new material that may lead to lightweight armor, protective coatings, blast shields and other impact-resistant structures.

Creating new procedures that improve mass drone traffic is the purpose of LABYRINTH, a European research project coordinated by the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) with the participation of 13 international organisations within the R&D&I, transport, emergency, and auxiliary services fields. Researchers hope to use these drone swarm applications to improve civil road, train, sea, and air transport, making it safer, more efficient, and more sustainable.

UC Riverside engineers made a pneumatic RAM chip using microfluidic valves instead of electronic transistors. The valves remain sealed against a pressure differential even when disconnected from an air supply line, creating trapped pressure differentials that function as memories and maintain the states of a robot's actuators. Dense arrays of these valves can perform advanced operations and reduce the expensive, bulky, and power-consuming electronic hardware typically used to control pneumatic robots.

Northwestern University engineers have developed the first full, three-dimensional (3D), dynamic simulation of a rat's complete whisker system, offering rare, realistic insight into how rats obtain tactile information.

Prosthetics currently lack the sensation of "touch." To enable a more natural feeling prosthetic hand interface, researchers are the first to incorporate stretchable tactile sensors using liquid metal and machine learning. This hierarchical multi-finger tactile sensation integration could provide a higher level of intelligence for artificial hands by improving control, providing haptic feedback and reconnecting amputees to a previously severed sense of touch.

An international team of researchers recently developed and experimentally demonstrated a spectral-volumetric (SV) CUP system that can simultaneously capture 5D information with a single snapshot measurement.

New formula can calculate the elasticity of hexagonal lattice material.