On April 9, a trailer with the words “Born by Fire” emblazoned on the back pulled down MIT's North Corridor (a.k.a. the Outfinite). Students, clad in orange construction vests, maneuvered their futuristic creation out of the trailer, eliciting a surge of curious bystanders. The aerodynamic shell is covered by 5 square meters of solar panels. This multi-occupancy solar car, Gemini, designed and built by the Solar Electric Vehicle Team (SEVT), is slated to race in the 2024 American Solar Challenge. Positioned just outside Building 13, Gemini made its inaugural public appearance at this ..read more

It’s commonly thought that the most abundant element in the universe, hydrogen, exists mainly alongside other elements — with oxygen in water, for example, and with carbon in methane. But naturally occurring underground pockets of pure hydrogen are punching holes in that notion — and generating attention as a potentially unlimited source of carbon-free power.   One interested party is the U.S. Department of Energy, which last month awarded $20 million in research grants to 18 teams from laboratories, universities, and private companies to develop technologies that can lead to cheap, clean ..read more

Our muscles are nature’s perfect actuators — devices that turn energy into motion. For their size, muscle fibers are more powerful and precise than most synthetic actuators. They can even heal from damage and grow stronger with exercise. For these reasons, engineers are exploring ways to power robots with natural muscles. They’ve demonstrated a handful of “biohybrid” robots that use muscle-based actuators to power artificial skeletons that walk, swim, pump, and grip. But for every bot, there’s a very different build, and no general blueprint for how to get the most out of muscles for any given ..read more

From wiping up spills to serving up food, robots are being taught to carry out increasingly complicated household tasks. Many such home-bot trainees are learning through imitation; they are programmed to copy the motions that a human physically guides them through. It turns out that robots are excellent mimics. But unless engineers also program them to adjust to every possible bump and nudge, robots don’t necessarily know how to handle these situations, short of starting their task from the top. Now MIT engineers are aiming to give robots a bit of common sense when faced with situations that p ..read more

MIT class 2.679 (Electronics for Mechanical Systems II) offers a sort of alchemy that transforms students from consumers of knowledge to explorers and innovators, and equips them with a range of important new tools at their disposal, students say. “Topics which could otherwise feel intimidating are well-scoped each week so that students come out knowing not only what a concept is, but why it’s useful and how to actually implement it,” says graduating senior Audrey Chen. “I could consistently come in with no background and come out with practical experience I could use in future projects. I’d d ..read more

If a robot traveling to a destination has just two possible paths, it needs only to compare the routes’ travel time and probability of success. But if the robot is traversing a complex environment with many possible paths, choosing the best route amid so much uncertainty can quickly become an intractable problem. MIT researchers developed a method that could help this robot efficiently reason about the best routes to its destination. They created an algorithm for constructing roadmaps of an uncertain environment that balances the tradeoff between roadmap quality and computational efficiency, e ..read more

Until recently, bespoke tailoring — clothing made to a customer’s individual specifications — was the only way to have garments that provided the perfect fit for your physique. For most people, the cost of custom tailoring is prohibitive. But the invention of active fibers and innovative knitting processes is changing the textile industry. “We all wear clothes and shoes,” says Sasha MicKinlay MArch ’23, a recent graduate of the MIT Department of Architecture. “It’s a human need. But there’s also the human need to express oneself. I like the idea of customizing clothes in a sustainable way. Thi ..read more

Before a robot can grab dishes off a shelf to set the table, it must ensure its gripper and arm won’t crash into anything and potentially shatter the fine china. As part of its motion planning process, a robot typically runs “safety check” algorithms that verify its trajectory is collision-free. However, sometimes these algorithms generate false positives, claiming a trajectory is safe when the robot would actually collide with something. Other methods that can avoid false positives are typically too slow for robots in the real world. Now, MIT researchers have developed a safety check techniqu ..read more

As it trundles around an ancient lakebed on Mars, NASA’s Perseverance rover is assembling a one-of-a-kind rock collection. The car-sized explorer is methodically drilling into the Red Planet’s surface and pulling out cores of bedrock that it’s storing in sturdy titanium tubes. Scientists hope to one day return the tubes to Earth and analyze their contents for traces of embedded microbial life. Since it touched down on the surface of Mars in 2021, the rover has filled 20 of its 43 tubes with cores of bedrock. Now, MIT geologists have remotely determined a crucial property of the rocks collected ..read more

In the Dzaleka Refugee Camp in Malawi, Jospin Hassan didn’t have access to the education opportunities he sought. So, he decided to create his own.  Hassan knew the booming fields of data science and artificial intelligence could bring job opportunities to his community and help solve local challenges. After earning a spot in the 2020-21 cohort of the Certificate Program in Computer and Data Science from MIT Refugee Action Hub (ReACT), Hassan started sharing MIT knowledge and skills with other motivated learners in Dzaleka. MIT ReACT is now Emerging Talent, part of the Jameel World Educat ..read more