Category Technology/Electronics

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, are now used to capture images and carry out a wide range of missions in outdoor environments. While there are now several UAV designs with different advantages and characteristics, most conventional aerial robots are underactuated, meaning that they have fewer independent actuators than their degrees of freedom (DoF).

Underactuated systems are often more cost-effective and can be controlled using simpler control strategies than overactuated systems (i.e., robots that have more independent actuators than their DoF). Nonetheless, they are often less reliable and not as capable of precisely controlling their position and orientation.

Researchers at Tec...

The wing dynamics of flying animal species have been the inspiration for numerous flying robotic systems. While birds and bats typically flap their wings using the force produced by their pectoral and wing muscles, the processes underlying the wing movements of many insects remain poorly understood.

Researchers at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL, Switzerland) and Konkuk University (South Korea) recently set out to explore how herbivorous insects known as rhinoceros beetles deploy and retract their wings. The insight they gathered, outlined in a paper published in Nature, was then used to develop a new flapping microrobot that can passively deploy and retract its wings, without the need for extensive actuators.

“Insects, including beetles, are theoretically belie...

Like a supersonic jet being blasted with high-speed winds, Earth is constantly being bombarded by a stream of charged particles from the sun known as solar wind.

Just like wind around a jet or water around a boat, these solar wind streams curve around Earth’s magnetic field, or magnetosphere, forming on the sunward side of the magnetosphere a front called a bow shock and stretching it into a wind sock shape with a long tail on the nightside.

Dramatic changes to the solar wind alter the structure and dynamics of the magnetosphere...

U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) scientists confirm the identification of a new class of semiconductor nanocrystals with bright ground-state excitons, a significant advancement in the field of optoelectronics, in an article published in the American Chemical Society (ACS) journal ACS Nano.

The groundbreaking theoretical research could revolutionize the development of highly efficient light-emitting devices and other technologies.

Generally, the lowest-energy exciton in nanocrystals is poorly emitting, earning the name “dark” exciton. Because it slows the emission of light, the dark exciton limits the performance of nanocrystal-based devices like lasers or light-emitting diodes (LEDs)...