Innovation

MIT engineers have designed a “brain-on-a-chip,” smaller than a piece of confetti, that is made from tens of thousands of Artificial brain synapses known as memristors — silicon-based components that mimic the information-transmitting synapses in the human brain. The researchers borrowed from principles of metallurgy to fabricate each memristor from alloys of silver and copper, along with silicon. When they ran the chip through several visual tasks, the chip was able to “remember” stored images and reproduce them many times over, in versions that were crisper and cleaner compared with…

Package delivery may be going to the dogs.In the race to automate the delivery of packages and food in urban areas, most companies have been focusing on wheeled robots. But the German automotive company Continental has another idea. At the consumer Electronics in Las Vegas last week, it showed off a four-legged delivery robot designed to walk packages right to customers’ front doors. In demonstrations at the Las Vegas Convention Center, the battery-powered ANYmal Robot — made by Swiss robotics manufacturer ANYbotics — hopped out of Continental’s CUbE autonomous vehicle, stepped…

Singapore kicked off a global rush to develop a contact tracing apps for the novel covid-19 when the city-state launched an apparently new system in March. But the project actually drew inspiration from a 2014 U.S. high school project that won an international prize but found no backers – until now. It all started when Rohan Suri created an app at Thomas Jefferson High School in Alexandria, Virginia, to tell his mom to leave home for the bus stop when he was seven minutes away. As the Ebola epidemic ravaged western Africa at…

This itsy-bitsy robot can’t climb up the waterspout yet but it can run, jump, carry heavy payloads and turn on a dime. Dubbed HAMR-JR, this microrobot developed by researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Harvard Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, is a half-scale version of the cockroach-inspired Harvard Ambulatory Microrobot or HAMR. About the size of a penny, HAMR-JR can perform almost all of the feats of its larger-scale predecessor, making it one of the most dexterous microrobots to…

Inspired by the biomechanics of cheetahs, researchers have developed a new type of soft robot that is capable of moving more quickly on a solid surfaces or in the water than previous generations of soft robots. The new soft robotics are also capable of grabbing objects delicately — or with sufficient strength to lift heavy objects. “Cheetahs are the fastest creatures on land, and they derive their speed and power from the flexing of their spines,” says Jie Yin, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at North Carolina…