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’s flight control system. To help such a drone stay on target, MIT researchers developed a…
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…
With a more efficient method for artificial pollination, farmers in the future could grow fruits and vegetables inside multilevel warehouses, boosting yields while mitigating some of agriculture’s harmful impacts on the environment. To help make this idea a reality, MIT researchers are developing robotic insects that could someday swarm out of mechanical hives to rapidly…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 Fellow Alexander Htet Kyaw, a graduate student pursuing dual master’s degrees in architectural studies…
Julie Shah ’04, SM ’06, PhD ’11, the H.N. Slater Professor in Aeronautics and Astronautics, has been named the new head of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro), effective May 1. “Julie brings an exceptional record of visionary and interdisciplinary leadership to this role. She has made substantial technical contributions in the field of…
Large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly useful for programming and robotics tasks, but for more complicated reasoning problems, the gap between these systems and humans looms large. Without the ability to learn new concepts like humans do, these systems fail to form good abstractions — essentially, high-level representations of complex concepts that skip less-important…
