Category Physics

3D Printing Drones Work like Bees to Build and Repair Structures while Flying

Timelapse light trace demonstrating multi-agent coordination of Aerial AM robot team.
A simulation of potential future building projects. Credit: Autonomous Manufacturing Lab, UCL

The technology, which has been tested in the lab, could ultimately be used for manufacturing and building in difficult-to-access or dangerous locations such as tall buildings or help with post-disaster relief construction, say the researchers.

3D printing is gaining momentum in the construction industry. Both on-site and in the factory, static and mobile robots print materials for use in construction projects, such as steel and concrete structures.

This new approach to 3D printing – led in its development by Imperial and Empa, the Swiss Federal Laboratories of Materials Science and Technology – uses flying robots, known as drones, that use collective building methods inspired by natural ...

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Researchers Create New Magnetic Quasiparticle

Florian Dirnberger_Vinod Menon_Magnetic Quasiparticle Creation
Optical resonator enhanced coupling of photons and spin-correlated excitations in a van der Waals magnetic crystal. Image created by Rezlind Bushati.

From The City College of New York’s Center for Discovery and Innovation and the Physics Department comes news of a new type of magnetic quasiparticle created by coupling light to a stack of ultrathin 2D magnets. This achievement sprouting from a collaboration with the University of Texas at Austin lays the foundation for an emergent strategy to artificially design materials by ensuring their strong interaction with light.

“Implementing our approach with magnetic materials is a promising path towards efficient magneto-optical effects,” said CCNY physicist Vinod M. Menon, whose group led the study...

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Tiny Soft Robot can Split into Tinier Bits then Reassemble after Passage Through Small Spaces

Tiny soft robot can be split into tinier bits to allow for passage through small spaces
Overview of trans-scale maneuver and scale reconfiguration strategies of the scale-reconfigurable miniature ferrofluidic robots (SMFRs). (A) Trans-scale control of the SMFR: locomotion of the centi-FR, milli-FR, and micro-FR based on magnetic gradient, both magnetic gradient and torque, and magnetic torque only, respectively. (B) Response behaviors of ferrofluid droplets in magnetic fields. (C) The SMFR is manipulated by a custom-designed magnetic actuation system (the M3RA system) composed of four electromagnets, a spherical permanent magnet (SPM), and a motorized translation stage. To easily observe the internal composition of the system, we hide a quarter of the structure...
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Machine Learning Generates 3D Model from 2D Pictures

Researchers from the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis have developed a machine learning algorithm that can create a continuous 3D model of cells from a partial set of 2D images that were taken using the same standard microscopy tools found in many labs today.

Their findings were published Sept. 16 in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence.

“We train the model on the set of digital images to obtain a continuous representation,” said Ulugbek Kamilov, assistant professor of electrical and systems engineering and of computer science and engineering. “Now, I can show it any way I want. I can zoom in smoothly and there is no pixelation.”

The key to this work was the use of a neural field network, a particular kind of machine learning system that...

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