Category Physics

The bipod gait is faster than the tripod gait during ground locomotion in a hexapod robot.

When vertebrates run, their legs exhibit minimal cont

act with the ground. But insects are different. These 6-legged creatures run fastest using a 3-legged, or “tripod” gait where they have 3 legs on the ground at all times – 2 on 1 side of their body and one on the other. The tripod gait has long inspired engineers who design six-legged robots, but is it necessarily the fastest and most efficient way for bio-inspired robots to move on the ground?

Researchers at EPFL and UNIL revealed there is in fact a faster way for robots to locomote on flat ground, provided they don’t have the adhesive pads used by insects to climb walls and ceilings...

Researchers from MIT’s Microsystems Technologies Laboratories (MTL) have designed a new power converter that maintains its efficiency at currents ranging from 100 picoamps to 1 milliamp, a span that encompasses a millionfold increase in current levels.

Design reduces converter’s resting power consumption by 50%. The “internet of things”, IoT is the idea that vehicles, appliances, civil structures, manufacturing equipment, and even livestock will soon have sensors that report information directly to networked servers, aiding with maintenance and the coordination of tasks. Those sensors will have to operate at very low powers, in order to extend battery life for months or make do with energy harvested from the environment...

Lithium-sulfur battery with Mixed Conduction Membrane barrier to stop polysulfide shuttling. Credit: Sri Narayan and Derek Moy

USC researchers may have just found a solution for one of the biggest stumbling blocks to the next wave of rechargeable batteries—small enough for cellphones and powerful enough for cars. In a paper published in the January issue of the Journal of the Electrochemical Society, Sri Narayan and Derek Moy of the USC Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute outline how they developed an alteration to the lithium-sulfur battery that could make it more than competitive with the industry standard lithium-ion battery.

The lithium-sulfur battery, long thought to be better at energy storage capacity than its more popular lithium-ion counterpart, was hampered by its short cycle ...

The new perovskite solar cells have achieved an efficiency of 20.1 per cent and can be manufactured at low temperatures, which reduces the cost and expands the number of possible applications. (Photo: Kevin Soobrian)

Research removes a key barrier to large-scale manufacture of low-cost, printable perovskite solar cells. A U of T Engineering innovation could make printing solar cells as easy and inexpensive as printing a newspaper. “Economies of scale have greatly reduced the cost of silicon manufacturing,” said Professor Ted Sargent, Canada Research Chair in Nanotechnology. “Perovskite solar cells can enable us to use techniques already established in the printing industry to produce solar cells at very low cost...