-
All you have to do is think about it.
Or at least that’s what it would look like to someone watching you use the robotic finger system that PhD student Faye Wu is designing in Professor Harry Asada’s...
-
Assistant Professor Alberto Rodriguez led a team in this past May’s Amazon Picking Challenge, winning second place out of 28 entrants for their robot. The challenge, whose judging panel included...
-
The image that comes to mind when you hear Professor John Leonard describe his dream of developing a robot that is what he calls “a lifelong learner” is so cinematic it’s almost hard to believe:
“...
-
Engineering was in Domitilla Del Vecchio’s blood from the very beginning: Growing up in Rome as the daughter of an engineer, she spent long hours of her childhood tinkering and playing in her father’...
-
The blue-rayed limpet is a tiny mollusk that lives in kelp beds along the coasts of Norway, Iceland, the United Kingdom, Portugal, and the Canary Islands. These diminutive organisms — as small as a...
-
Here’s one way to get kids excited about programming: a "robot garden" with dozens of fast-changing LED lights and more than 100 origami robots that can crawl, swim, and blossom like flowers.
A team...
-
Just one minute with Professor Alexander Slocum and you can see why his course 2.75 is so popular – and successful. He has a way of inciting passion and excitement in his students while imbuing them...
-
As a grape slowly dries and shrivels, its surface creases, ultimately taking on the wrinkled form of a raisin. Similar patterns can be found on the surfaces of other dried materials, as well as in...
-
One day in the 1990s, as he was riding home from high school in São Paulo, Tonio Buonassisi looked out the bus window at the Brazilian city’s long lines of traffic, and its smoggy haze. In that...
-
Back in 2009, alumna Jodie Wu ’09 launched Global Cycle Solutions (GCS) in Tanzania to bring small-scale farmers an innovative product she designed in MIT’s D-Lab: a bike-mounted maize sheller....
-
Elliot Avila (SB ’14) is a recent graduate of the Department of Mechanical Engineering who has a particular interest in the developing world. As an undergraduate student in D-Lab, he traveled to...
-
Alumna Megan Smith, CTO of the United States. Courtesy of White House.
Megan Smith received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering from MIT in 1986 and 1988, respectively....
-
MechE faculty members are engineering for global change through their research, but that’s not the only way to make the world a better place.
Several are also collaborating with international...
-
When PhD candidate John Lewandowski started working on a low-cost device for the rapid diagnosis of malaria as a graduate student at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU), it was already a fairly...
-
Designing products for the developing world can be a hit-or-miss endeavor: While there may be a dire need for products addressing problems such as access to clean water, sanitation, and electricity,...
-
You’ve probably heard of MechE alum and Associate Professor Hugh Herr (SM ’93), head of the Biomechatronics group at MIT Media Lab.
The TED Talk he gave earlier this year sparked a flurry of media...
-
Among the 20 students selected by Aviation Week magazine as "Tomorrow's Engineering Leaders: The Twenty20s" are Michael Stern, a Lincoln Scholar assigned to MIT Lincoln Laboratory's Rapid Prototyping...
-
Researchers have made great progress in recent years in the design and creation of biological circuits — systems that, like electronic circuits, can take a number of different inputs and deliver a...
-
Global Research Innovation and Technology (GRIT), an MIT MechE spinoff started by Tish Scolnik ’10, Mario Bollini ’09 SM ’12, Benjamin Judge ’11 MEng ’12, and Assistant Professor Amos Winter SM ’05...
-
"Michelangelo didn’t attend a semester of lectures,” says Sanjay Sarma, “he learned in the studio with a master looking over his shoulder.” And the future of higher education, Sarma says, will carry...