Author: dweetleapp

A new imaging technique developed by MIT researchers could enable quality-control robots in a warehouse to peer through a cardboard shipping box and see that the handle of a mug buried under packing peanuts is broken. Their approach leverages millimeter wave (mmWave) signals, the same type of signals used in Wi-Fi, to create accurate 3D read more

Diffusion models like OpenAI’s DALL-E are becoming increasingly useful in helping brainstorm new designs. Humans can prompt these systems to generate an image, create a video, or refine a blueprint, and come back with ideas they hadn’t considered before. But did you know that generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) models are also making headway in creating read more

Modern fighter jets contain hundreds or even thousands of sensors. Some of those sensors collect data every second, others every nanosecond. For the engineering teams building and testing those jets, all those data points are hugely valuable — if they can make sense of them. Nominal is an advanced software platform made for engineers building read more

Launched in February of this year, the MIT Generative AI Impact Consortium (MGAIC), a presidential initiative led by MIT’s Office of Innovation and Strategy and administered by the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, issued a call for proposals, inviting researchers from across MIT to submit ideas for innovative projects studying high-impact uses of read more

An autonomous drone carrying water to help extinguish a wildfire in the Sierra Nevada might encounter swirling Santa Ana winds that threaten to push it off course. Rapidly adapting to these unknown disturbances inflight presents an enormous challenge for the drone’sflight control system. To help such a drone stay on target, MIT researchers developed a read more

Ready for that long-awaited summer vacation? First, you’ll need to pack all items required for your trip into a suitcase, making sure everything fits securely without crushing anything fragile. Because humans possess strong visual and geometric reasoning skills, this is usually a straightforward problem, even if it may take a bit of finagling to squeeze read more

The ocean is teeming with life. But unless you get up close, much of the marine world can easily remain unseen. That’s because water itself can act as an effective cloak: Light that shines through the ocean can bend, scatter, and quickly fade as it travels through the dense medium of water and reflects off read more

The United States population is older than it has ever been. Today, the country’s median age is 38.9, which is nearly a decade older than it was in 1980. And the number of adults older than 65 is expected to balloon from 58 million to 82 million by 2050. The challenge of caring for the read more

MIT engineers are getting in on the robotic ping pong game with a powerful, lightweight design that returns shots with high-speed precision. The new table tennis bot comprises a multijointed robotic arm that is fixed to one end of a ping pong table and wields a standard ping pong paddle. Aided by several high-speed cameras read more

A human clearing junk out of an attic can often guess the contents of a box simply by picking it up and giving it a shake, without the need to see what’s inside. Researchers from MIT, Amazon Robotics, and the University of British Columbia have taught robots to do something similar. They developed a technique read more

The speed with which new technologies hit the market is nothing compared to the speed with which talented researchers find creative ways to use them, train them, even turn them into things we can’t live without. One such researcher is MIT MAD FellowAlexander Htet Kyaw, a graduate student pursuing dual master’s degrees in architectural studies read more

Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airportsis a landmark album in ambient and electronic music. Although it wasn’t the first ambient album, it was the first album to be explicitly labelled as ‘ambient music’. Music for Airports was released in 1979, though some sources cite 1978 due to its copyright date. It marked a continuation read more

For a robot, the real world is a lot to take in. Making sense of every data point in a scene can take a huge amount of computational effort and time. Using that information to then decide how to best help a human is an even thornier exercise. Now, MIT roboticists have a way to read more

When Michael Benjamin, principal research scientist in the MITCenter for Ocean Engineering, arrived at MIT 25 years ago, only professors and postdocs were allowed to touch the department’s underwater vehicles. The vehicles were expensive, he explains, and required extensive training to operate. “People were scared todeath about losing or damaging them, [and] there was no read more

When major disasters hit and structures collapse, people can become trapped under rubble. Extricating victims from these hazardous environments can be dangerous and physically exhausting. To help rescue teams navigate these structures, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Notre Dame, developed the Soft Pathfinding Robotic Observation Unit (SPROUT). SPROUT is read more