Category Physics

Engineers design Autonomous Robot that can Open Doors, find Wall Outlet to Recharge

A student in a face mask stands nest to a robot holding open a door.
Engineering student Sam King demonstrates how UC’s autonomous robot pivots around a door in UC’s Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Systems Laboratory. Photo/Ravenna Rutledge/UC Creative + Brand

Engineering students have designed an autonomous robot that can find and open doors in 3D digital simulations. Now they’re building the hardware for an autonomous robot that not only can open its own doors but also can find the nearest electric wall outlet to recharge without human help.

One flaw in the notion that robots will take over the world is that the world is full of doors.

And doors are kryptonite to robots, said Ou Ma, an aerospace engineering professor at the University of Cincinnati.

“Robots can do many things, but if you want one to open a door by itself and go through ...

Read More

AI behind Deepfakes may Power Materials Design Innovations

This image depicts a generative adversarial network creating new alloy compositions
The Generator network (G) uses statistical distributions learned from prior observations to imagine new materials with specific properties. Credit: Wesley Reinhart. All Rights Reserved.

The person staring back from the computer screen may not actually exist, thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) capable of generating convincing but ultimately fake images of human faces. Now this same technology may power the next wave of innovations in materials design, according to Penn State scientists.

“We hear a lot about deepfakes in the news today – AI that can generate realistic images of human faces that don’t correspond to real people,” said Wesley Reinhart, assistant professor of materials science and engineering and Institute for Computational and Data Sciences faculty co-hire, at Penn S...

Read More

Thinnest X-ray Detector ever created

Highly sensitive and with a rapid response time, the new X-ray detector is less than 10 nanometres thick and could one day lead to real-time imaging of cellular biology.

Scientists in Australia have used tin mono-sulfide (SnS) nanosheets to create the thinnest X-ray detector ever made, potentially enabling real-time imaging of cellular biology.

X-ray detectors are tools that allow energy transported by radiation to be recognised visually or electronically, like medical imaging or Geiger counters.

SnS has already shown great promise as a material for use in photovoltaics, field effect transistors and catalysis.

Now, members of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Exciton Science, based at Monash Universityand RMIT University, have shown that SnS nanosheets are also excellent can...

Read More

Electron Family Creates Previously Unknown State of Matter

A four-part electron family creates a completely new state of matter in a metal. Researchers from the Dresden-Würzburg Cluster of Excellence ct.qmat have demonstrated this unusual phenomenon for the first time worldwide.

Researchers have demonstrated a completely novel state of matter in a metal. It is created by the combination of four electrons — until now, only electron pairs were known. This discovery could lead to a new type of superconductivity, an entirely new research direction, and revolutionary technologies such as quantum sensors.

An international research team from the Cluster of Excellence ct.qmat-Complexity and Topology in Quantum Matter has demonstrated a completely novel state of matter in a metal...

Read More