Robotics & Automation

An innovative underground radar technology developed at Louisiana Tech University is helping the City of Slidell in south Louisiana to identify and document underground infrastructure damage that had gone undetected in the months and years following Hurricane Katrina.

English ivy has the ability to latch on so tight to trees and buildings that the plant can withstand the winds of hurricanes and tornadoes. Researchers from The Ohio State University pinpointed the spherical particles within English ivy’s adhesive and identified the primary protein within them.

Drexel University researchers have developed a new method for making polymer nanobrushes. The technology can be used in various medical applications, including coating, biomedical, sensing, and catalysis processes.

A mobile container from Rice University sterilizes surgical instruments in low-resource settings. The "Sterile Box," built into a standard 20-foot steel shipping container, houses a water system for decontamination and a solar-powered autoclave for steam sterilization.

Three researchers from Lehigh University have found a better, more natural way to produce quantum dots, the valuable semiconductor nanoparticles that support medical imaging applications. The method begins with engineered bacterial cells in a simple, aqueous solution and ends with functional...

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab have developed a new imaging device that consists of a loose bundle of optical fibers; no lenses or protective housing are needed. Tight bundles of the fibers could yield endoscopes with narrower diameters.

Rice University bioengineers have reprogrammed a laser cutter to etch 50,000 microwells per hour. The open-source, low-cost method for making microwells could reduce the cost of mass-producing metastatic microtumors and therapeutic microtissues for screening and research.

When children are born with a missing heart ventricle, doctors can perform a Fontan surgical procedure; the operation creates a passive circulation network to replace the blood pumping function. Inefficiency in circulation, however, often increases over time. A heart pump motor, using NASA Glenn Research...

Brigham Young University (BYU) researchers have engineered new minimally invasive surgery concepts that eliminate the need for pin joints and other parts, instead relying on the deflection inherent in origami to create motion.