Giving robots a hand
Developing wrist mechanisms for robots has long proven a challenge. They’re often complicated and bulky, and they struggle with certain maneuvers, such as unscrewing a light bulb or turning a door handle.
Yale researchers, led by Professor Aaron Dollar, have taken a simpler approach that could give robots a way to handle more complex movements. Forgoing the use of cameras or sensors, their design features a spherical mechanism that can both grasp and rotate a wide range of objects—an ability critical for putting robots to use in homes and other unstructured environments.
Professor wins CAREER Award
For a project that predicts how very small particles move in porous environments, Professor Amir Pahlavan has won a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation. Pahlavan will use the $610,000, five-year grant to develop a means of predicting and controlling the transport of colloids suspended in porous media, which can include everything from soil to biological tissues to human-made materials. The research has the potential for a broad range of applications, including drug delivery to tumors, filtration, wastewater treatment, and contaminant remediation.
A better way to make nanowires
One-dimensional topological nanomaterials—that is, extremely thin nanowires—hold great promise for quantum and electronic devices. Making them on a large scale, though, is tricky and time-consuming. A team of researchers led by Professor Jan Schroers has developed a new method for creating these materials that’s quick and easy to scale up. Their approach allows atoms to essentially self-organize, automatically moving from a high-pressure environment to a low-pressure one to form single-crystal nanowires. The breakthrough could lead to a practical way to manufacture nanowires at a large scale for industries and research fields specializing in quantum computing, optoelectronics, and others.
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