Robots with wheels could potentially navigate a variety of indoor and outdoor environments, traveling for longer distances and with fewer risks of losing balance. While some wheeled robots have achieved very promising results in recent years, most of them are unable...
TECHXPLORE
New insight about the working principles of bipolar membranes could guide future fuel cell design
Bipolar membranes are a class of ion-conductive polymers comprised of two oppositely charged layers, known as the cation-exchange and anion-exchange layer. These membranes are central to the functioning of various technologies, including electrolyzers and hydrogen...
A miniaturized vision-based tactile sensor based on fiber optic bundles
Researchers at Meta AI, Stanford University, Technische, Universität Dresden and the German Cancer Research Center (DFKZ) recently developed DIGIT Pinki, a miniature-sized sensor that can detect tactile information. This sensor, presented in a paper posted...
A fusion SLAM system that enhances the sensing and localization capabilities of biped climbing robots
Climbing robots could have many valuable real-world applications, ranging from the completion of maintenance tasks on roofs or other tall structures to the delivery of parcels or survival kits in locations that are difficult to access. To be successfully deployed in...
A scalable reinforcement learning–based framework to facilitate the teleoperation of humanoid robots
The effective operation of robots from a distance, also known as teleoperation, could allow humans to complete a vast range of manual tasks remotely, including risky and complex procedures. Yet teleoperation could also be used to compile datasets of human motions,...
A framework to improve air-ground robot navigation in complex occlusion-prone environments
Robotic systems have so far been primarily deployed in warehouses, airports, malls, offices, and other indoor environments, where they assist humans with basic manual tasks or answer simple queries. In the future, however, they could also be deployed in unknown and...
Exploring the resilience of the Texas power grid against extreme weather conditions
The Gulf Coast of the United States is often hit by tropical cyclones (TCs), hurricanes and other extreme weather phenomena, which can cause widespread electricity outages. Climate change and global warming are expected to increase the risk of these events occurring,...
Using a 2D perovskite oxide as a photoactive high-κ gate dielectric
Two-dimensional (2D) superconducting materials have been found to be promising for the development of miniaturized optoelectronic devices. To perform well while consuming less energy, however, these smaller devices require a higher gate capacitance (i.e., gates that...
A new strategy for fabricating high-density vertical organic electrochemical transistor arrays
Organic electrochemical transistors (OECTs) are an emerging class of transistors based on organic superconducting materials known for their ability to modulate electrical current in response to small changes in the voltage applied to their gate electrode. Like other...
An optimization-based method to enhance autonomous parking
Vehicles that can drive themselves have been a long sought after goal both of robotics research and the automotive industry. While various companies have been investing in these vehicles and testing them, they have so far only deployed them in a limited number of...