First Flight of an Airplane with no Moving Parts

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MIT, Private Company Plan Fusion Reactor by 2033

Progress toward the long-sought dream of fusion power — potentially an inexhaustible and zero-carbon source of energy — could be about to take a dramatic leap forward.

Development of this carbon-free, combustion-free source of energy is now on a faster track toward realization, thanks to a collaboration between MIT and a new private company, Commonwealth Fusion Systems. CFS will join with MIT to carry out rapid, staged research leading to a new generation of fusion experiments and power plants based on advances in high-temperature superconductors — work made possible by decades of federal government funding for basic research.

CFS is announcing today that it has attracted an investment of $50 million in support of this effort from the Italian energy company Eni. In addition, CFS continues to seek the support of additional investors. CFS will fund fusion research at MIT as part of this collaboration, with an ultimate goal of rapidly commercializing fusion energy and establishing a new industry.

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The JPL's Hedgehog Bots for Exploring Asteroids and Comets

As demonstrated by the bumpy landing of ESA's Philae lander on comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, exploring comets, asteroids, and small moons can be difficult due to their low gravity. Not only can landing on one be like trying to alight on a trampoline, but roving around their surfaces is next to impossible because the negligible gravity offers practically no traction. To overcome this, a team of engineers is developing Hedgehog, a completely symmetrical robot rover for low-gravity exploration that moves by hopping.

A joint project by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Stanford University, and MIT, the Hedgehog robot gets around these limitations with an unusual form of locomotion that allows it to hop, tumble, skip, and even launch itself with artificial "tornadoes." Essentially a cube with horns or spikes on each corner, it has no right way up and every face is identical, so it doesn't matter how it lands. In addition, the cube shape makes it easy to pack economically in a spacecraft.

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MIT's Cheetah Bot Bounds to the Robopocalypse

pop sci write up.

New Algorithm Allows the Robopocalypse to Divide up the job

Today's industrial robots are remarkably efficient -- as long as they're in a controlled environment where everything is exactly where they expect it to be.

But put them in an unfamiliar setting, where they have to think for themselves, and their efficiency plummets. And the difficulty of on-the-fly motion planning increases exponentially with the number of robots involved. For even a simple collaborative task, a team of, say, three autonomous robots might have to think for several hours to come up with a plan of attack.

This week, at the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers' International Conference on Robotics and Automation, a group of MIT researchers were nominated for two best-paper awards for a new algorithm that can significantly reduce robot teams' planning time. The plan the algorithm produces may not be perfectly efficient, but in many cases, the savings in planning time will more than offset the added execution time.

The researchers also tested the viability of their algorithm by using it to guide a crew of three robots in the assembly of a chair.

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Robopocalyptic Oceans! MIT Develops Machine Learning for Unmanned Underwater Vehicles

For the last decade, scientists have deployed increasingly capable underwater robots to map and monitor pockets of the ocean to track the health of fisheries, and survey marine habitats and species. In general, such robots are effective at carrying out low-level tasks, specifically assigned to them by human engineers -- a tedious and time-consuming process for the engineers.

When deploying autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), much of an engineer's time is spent writing scripts, or low-level commands, in order to direct a robot to carry out a mission plan. Now a new programming approach developed by MIT engineers gives robots more "cognitive" capabilities, enabling humans to specify high-level goals, while a robot performs high-level decision-making to figure out how to achieve these goals.

For example, an engineer may give a robot a list of goal locations to explore, along with any time constraints, as well as physical directions, such as staying a certain distance above the seafloor. Using the system devised by the MIT team, the robot can then plan out a mission, choosing which locations to explore, in what order, within a given timeframe. If an unforeseen event prevents the robot from completing a task, it can choose to drop that task, or reconfigure the hardware to recover from a failure, on the fly.

In March, the team tested the autonomous mission-planning system during a research cruise off the western coast of Australia. Over three weeks, the MIT engineers, along with groups from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the Australian Center for Field Robotics, the University of Rhode Island, and elsewhere, tested several classes of AUVs, and their ability to work cooperatively to map the ocean environment.

The MIT researchers tested their system on an autonomous underwater glider, and demonstrated that the robot was able to operate safely among a number of other autonomous vehicles, while receiving higher-level commands. The glider, using the system, was able to adapt its mission plan to avoid getting in the way of other vehicles, while still achieving its most important scientific objectives. If another vehicle was taking longer than expected to explore a particular area, the glider, using the MIT system, would reshuffle its priorities, and choose to stay in its current location longer, in order to avoid potential collisions.

"We wanted to show that these vehicles could plan their own missions, and execute, adapt, and re-plan them alone, without human support," says Brian Williams, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, and principal developer of the mission-planning system. "With this system, we were showing we could safely zigzag all the way around the reef, like an obstacle course."

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Social Textiles: I can see no way This Could end Badly

What if your likes and interests on social media were broadcast to the world offline? Would that make it easier for you to make real-world connections with people? That’s the idea behind Social Textiles, a wearable social network created by Media Lab students Viirj Kan, Katsuya Fujii, Judith Amores, and Chang Long Zhu Jin — members of the Fluid Interfaces and Tangible Media groups.

This wearable network is made up of t-shirts that light up when wearers share a common interest. When people wearing Social Textiles are within 12 feet of one another, their shirts will give a quick buzz on the shoulder to alert them that someone with a common interest is near. When the wearers identify each other and make a connection — by physically touching their new connection’s shirt — the shirt will light up, revealing their shared interest.

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Robopocalypse in Singapore! Autonomous Vehicles Tested! EGADS!

Harvard & MIT Produce First Nano Foundry...From DNA!

Researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University have unveiled a new method to form tiny 3D metal nanoparticles in prescribed shapes and dimensions using DNA, Nature's building block, as a construction mold.

The ability to mold inorganic nanoparticles out of materials such as gold and silver in precisely designed 3D shapes is a significant breakthrough that has the potential to advance laser technology, microscopy, solar cells, electronics, environmental testing, disease detection and more.

"We built tiny foundries made of stiff DNA to fabricate metal nanoparticles in exact three-dimensional shapes that we digitally planned and designed," said Peng Yin, senior author of the paper, Wyss core faculty member and Assistant Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School.

The Wyss team's findings, described in a paper titled "Casting Inorganic Structures with DNA Molds," were published today in Science. The work was done in collaboration with MIT's Laboratory for Computational Biology and Biophysics, led by Mark Bathe, senior co-author of the paper.

"The paper's findings describe a significant advance in DNA nanotechnology as well as in inorganic nanoparticle synthesis," Yin said. For the very first time, a general strategy to manufacture inorganic nanoparticles with user-specified 3D shapes has been achieved to produce particles as small as 25 nanometers or less, with remarkable precision (less than 5 nanometers). A sheet of paper is approximately 100,000 nanometers thick.

The 3D inorganic nanoparticles are first conceived and meticulously planned using computer design software. Using the software, the researchers design three-dimensional "frameworks" of the desired size and shape built from linear DNA sequences, which attract and bind to one another in a predictable manner.

"Over the years, scientists have been very successful at making complex 3D shapes from DNA using diverse strategies," said Wei Sun, a postdoctoral scholar in the Wyss' Molecular Systems Lab and the lead author of the paper. For example, in 2012, the Wyss team revealed how computer-aided design could be used to construct hundreds of different self-assembling one-, two-, and three-dimensional DNA nanoshapes with perfect accuracy. It is this ability to design arbitrary nanostructures using DNA manipulation that inspired the Wyss team to envision using these DNA structures as practical foundries, or "molds", for inorganic substances.

"The challenge was to translate this kind of 3D geometrical control into the ability to cast structures in other diverse and functionally-relevant materials, such as gold and silver," Sun said.

Just as any expanding material can be shaped inside a mold to take on a defined 3D form, the Wyss team set out to grow inorganic particles within the confined hollow spaces of stiff DNA nanostructures

The concept can be likened to the Japanese method of growing watermelons in glass cubes. By nurturing watermelon seeds to maturity inside cube-shaped glass boxes, Japanese farmers create cube-shaped mature melons that allow for densely-packed shipping and storage of the fruit.

The Wyss researchers similarly planted a miniscule gold "seed" inside the hollow cavity of their carefully designed cube-shaped DNA mold and then stimulated it to grow. Using an activating chemical solution, the gold seed grew and expanded to fill all existing space within the DNA framework, resulting in a cuboid nanoparticle with the same dimensions as its mold., with the length, width and height of the particle able to be controlled independently.

Next, researchers fabricated varied 3D polygonal shapes, spheres, and more ambitious structures, such as a 3D Y-shaped nanoparticle and another structure comprising a cuboid shape sandwiched between two spheres, proving that structurally-diverse nanoparticles could be shaped using complex DNA mold designs.

Given their unthinkably small size, it may come as a surprise that stiff DNA molds are proportionally quite robust and strong, able to withstand the pressures of expanding inorganic materials. Although the team selected gold seedlings to cast their nanoparticles, there is a wide range of inorganic nanoparticles that can be forcibly shaped through this process of DNA nanocasting.

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Robopocalypse Now: MIT Gave DARPA/Boston Dynamics Atlas Hands

New Jersey Subpoenas Source Code, Documentation, Evidence of Criminal Activity for Nonfunctional Tidbit Bitcoin Mining Software

Four MIT students behind an award-winning Bitcoin mining tool will face off against New Jersey state authorities in court today when they attempt to fight back against a subpoena demanding their source code.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is representing 19-year-old MIT student Jeremy Rubin and three classmates in a remarkable case that stands out for the measure of aggression the state is using to obtain the code and identify anyone who might have tested the mining tool.

The case is reminiscent of a federal one that targeted Aaron Swartz after he was arrested by MIT police in 2011 for downloading more than 4 million scholarly journal articles from the JSTOR digital library, offered to MIT students, to make them more widely available. Swartz faced multiple charges for his activity and killed himself as he was preparing for trial. Although there is currently no indictment or pending criminal charges against Rubin and his friends, state authorities have indicated that they believe the researchers may have violated state laws. The case marks a disturbing trend among authorities to go after researchers, innovators, tinkerers and others who try to do cutting-edge projects to help the tech community, says EFF staff attorney Hanni Fakhoury.

“It’s a very broad subpoena that hints at criminal liability and civil liability,” he says. “For a bunch of college kids who put something together for a hackathon—they didn’t make any money, the project never got off the ground and now is completely disbanded—there are some very serious implications.”

The mining tool, known as Tidbit, was developed in late 2013 by Rubin and his classmates for the Node Knockout hackathon—only Rubin is identified on the subpoena but his three classmates are identified on the hackathon web site as Oliver Song, Kevin King and Carolyn Zhang. The now defunct tool was designed to offer web site visitors an alternative way to support the sites they visited by using their computers to mine Bitcoins for them in exchange for having online ads removed.

“We believe our utility for the end user comes in freeing up real estate on web pages,” King wrote about their program on the Node Knockout site. “Imagine a web where your amazon shopping cart doesn’t follow you around to every website you visit. We believe there should be more options than advertising for monetizing a website, and we believe we have a novel and non-intrusive solution. In this way, we provide utility to developers who can now include higher quality content on their websites, and utility to end users who are spared the wasted time in looking at ads.”

The clever design won the award for innovation in the programming competition.

“This is a very intriguing idea that could really transform online economics if it works,” one supporter wrote on the hackathon site. “There is a much broader discussion to have about mining bitcoins vs doing other useful tasks (e.g. a friendly form of mechanical turk).”

But the program never got beyond the proof-of-concept stage before Rubin and Tidbit, as an entity, were hit with subpoenas from the New Jersey

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MIT's Pure Electric Cheetah Runs 10 MPH/16 km/h Towards Robopocalypse

Harvard & MIT Advance Robopocalypse With Walking Origami Bot

MIT Explores Robopocalyptic Enhancements for the Human Hand

Twisting a screwdriver, removing a bottle cap, and peeling a banana are just a few simple tasks that are tricky to pull off single-handedly. Now a new wrist-mounted robot can provide a helping hand — or rather, fingers.

Researchers at MIT have developed a robot that enhances the grasping motion of the human hand. The device, worn around one’s wrist, works essentially like two extra fingers adjacent to the pinky and thumb. A novel control algorithm enables it to move in sync with the wearer’s fingers to grasp objects of various shapes and sizes. Wearing the robot, a user could use one hand to, for instance, hold the base of a bottle while twisting off its cap.

“This is a completely intuitive and natural way to move your robotic fingers,” says Harry Asada, the Ford Professor of Engineering in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. “You do not need to command the robot, but simply move your fingers naturally. Then the robotic fingers react and assist your fingers.”

Ultimately, Asada says, with some training people may come to perceive the robotic fingers as part of their body — “like a tool you have been using for a long time, you feel the robot as an extension of your hand.” He hopes that the two-fingered robot may assist people with limited dexterity in performing routine household tasks, such as opening jars and lifting heavy objects. He and graduate student Faye Wu presented a paper on the robot this week at the Robotics: Science and Systems conference in Berkeley, Calif.

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The Robopocalypse Will be Squishy

[A] phase-changing material built from wax and foam, and capable of switching between hard and soft states, could allow even low-cost robots to perform the same feat.

The material — developed by Anette Hosoi, a professor of mechanical engineering and applied mathematics at MIT, and her former graduate student Nadia Cheng, alongside researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization and Stony Brook University — could be used to build deformable surgical robots. The robots could move through the body to reach a particular point without damaging any of the organs or vessels along the way.

Robots built from the material, which is described in a new paper in the journal Macromolecular Materials and Engineering, could also be used in search-and-rescue operations to squeeze through rubble looking for survivors, Hosoi says.

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Livermore & MIT Create Ultra Light, Ultra Stiff 3D Printed Material

Imagine a material with the same weight and density as aerogel -- a material so light it's called 'frozen smoke' -- but with 10,000 times more stiffness. This material could have a profound impact on the aerospace and automotive industries as well as other applications where lightweight, high-stiffness and high-strength materials are needed.

Lawrence Livermore and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have developed a material with these properties using additive micro-manufacturing processes. The research team's findings are published in a June 20 article in the journal Science.

Titled "Ultralight, Ultrastiff Mechanical Metamaterials," the article describes the team's development of micro-architected metamaterials -- artificial materials with properties not found in nature -- that maintain a nearly constant stiffness per unit mass density, even at ultralow density. Materials with these properties could someday be used to develop parts and components for aircraft, automobiles and space vehicles.

Most lightweight cellular materials have mechanical properties that degrade substantially with reduced density because their structural elements are more likely to bend under applied load. The team's metamaterials, however, exhibit ultrastiff properties across more than three orders of magnitude in density.

"These lightweight materials can withstand a load of at least 160,000 times their own weight," said LLNL Engineer Xiaoyu "Rayne" Zheng, lead author of the Science article. "The key to this ultrahigh stiffness is that all the micro-structural elements in this material are designed to be over constrained and do not bend under applied load."

The observed high stiffness is shown to be true with multiple constituent materials such as polymers, metals and ceramics, according to the research team's findings.

"Our micro-architected materials have properties that are governed by their geometric layout at the microscale, as opposed to chemical composition," said LLNL Engineer Chris Spadaccini, corresponding author of the article, who led the joint research team. "We fabricated these materials with projection micro-stereolithography."

This additive micro-manufacturing process involves using a micro-mirror display chip to create high-fidelity 3D parts one layer at a time from photosensitive feedstock materials. It allows the team to rapidly generate materials with complex 3D micro-scale geometries that are otherwise challenging or in some cases, impossible to fabricate.

"Now we can print a stiff and resilient material using a desktop machine," said MIT professor and key collaborator Nicholas Fang. "This allows us to rapidly make many sample pieces and see how they behave mechanically."

The team was able to build microlattices out of polymers, metals and ceramics.

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So Want! MIT's Supernumerary Robotic Limbs Bring us Closer to the Robopocalypse

Supernumerary Robotic Limbs (SRLs) are robotic limbs that, when worn, give you more limbs than you'd normally have. In other words, they're not robotic limbs designed to replace biological limbs that you might be missing, but rather robotic limbs designed to augment the number of limbs that you have already.

MIT researchers have been developing SRLs that can help you do stuff that would be annoying, uncomfortable, or impossible to do on your own. Today at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Hong Kong, they presented their latest SRL prototypes, with one model featuring a pair of limbs that spring from your shoulders and another with limbs that extend from your waist.

MIT's shoulder-mounted SRL is designed to assist in tasks that take place over your head, or in situations where your other two arms are busy and you need a hand (literally) with something. One example, shown in the second video below, would be in a construction context, where anything that needs to be attached to a ceiling has to be held up and hammered or screwed into place at the same time.

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Having held stuff up in situations where there was no place for someone else to help, something like this would be a life saver.  or at least minimize the frustration level.  If it ever becomes a product, I'm there.  So there.  One improvement (besides hands): connect the above to this. 

How an MIT Professor is Seeking to end Physical Disabilities Through the Robopocalypse

Hugh Herr is a living exemplar of the maxim that the best way to predict the future is to invent it. At the age of 17, Herr was already an accomplished mountaineer, but during an ice-climbing expedition he lost his way in a blizzard and was stranded on a mountainside for three days. By the time rescuers found him, both of his legs were doomed by frostbite and had to be amputated below the knee. Once his scars healed, Herr spent months in rehab rooms trying out prosthetic legs, but he found them unacceptable: How could he climb with such clunky things? Surely, he thought, medical technologists could build replacement parts that wouldn’t slow him down.

Today, three decades after his accident, Herr walks on bionic limbs of his own creation. As director of the biomechatronics group at the MIT Media Lab, Herr developed advanced prosthetics that he uses to walk, run, and even rock climb. And now, as he works with his colleagues to establish MIT’s new Center for Extreme Bionics, Herr is setting out not just to reinvent himself but the whole of society. “Fifty years out, I think we will have largely eliminated disability,” he declares, adding that he’s referring not just to physical disabilities but to many emotional and intellectual infirmities as well.

Herr believes the solutions lie not in biological or pharmacological cures but in novel electromechanical additions to our bodies. He gestures to his own artificial limbs to make the point. “My legs weren’t grown back; I wasn’t given a total limb transplant,” he notes. “If you eliminate the synthetics, all I can do is crawl. But with them,” he says with a slow smile, “I can more or less do anything.”

The MIT scientists are part of a movement aimed at ushering medicine into a cyborg age.

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All MIT Students to be Given $100 of BitCoin

Each of the 4,500-plus undergraduates at MIT will soon get $100 in bitcoin as part of a project launched by a pair of students who announced today that they’ve raised a half million dollars to fund the effort.

Organizers said they hope to establish “an ecosystem for digital currencies” at the Cambridge campus that will allow professors and researchers to study how students use bitcoin as well as to promote other academic and entrepreneurial activity around bitcoin.

The MIT Bitcoin Project is being led by Jeremy Rubin, a sophomore studying computer science at MIT , and Dan Elitzer, a first-year graduate student in MIT’s Sloan business school and president of the MIT Bitcoin Club, the students said in an announcement.

“Giving students access to cryptocurrencies is analogous to providing them with Internet access at the dawn of the Internet era,” said a statement from Rubin.

The duo said they have received more than $500,000 in pledges — primarily from alumni — to cover the $100 bitcoin handouts, which are scheduled to be distributed to undergraduates in the fall. The money will also fund other aspects of the project, including related “infrastructure” and informational activities.

In the months leading up to the campus-wide bitcoin giveaway, Rubin and Elitzer said they plan to educate student and businesses around campus about bitcoin — including at an “expo” scheduled for Saturday — and will help merchants set up systems to accept the digital currency.

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Meet the Real $6 Million Man