• Jul. 11, 2014
    Alberto Rodriguez, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, and incoming graduate student Nikhil Chavan-Dafle presented their work on robotic extrinsic dexterity — which they began at...
  • Jun. 19, 2014
    Explosions caused by leaking gas pipes under city streets have frequently made headlines in recent years, including one that leveled an apartment building in New York this spring. But while the...
  • May. 9, 2014
    This year’s arena for the annual robotics competition that caps the mechanical engineering class called 2.007 (Learning by Design) was based on a Winter Olympics theme, with dauntingly steep slopes...
  • Apr. 4, 2014
    Suppose you’re trying to navigate an unfamiliar section of a big city, and you’re using a particular cluster of skyscrapers as a reference point. Traffic and one-way streets force you to take some...
  • Dec. 10, 2013
    2.678 students present their final projects, autonomous robotics cars, which have to follow an obstacle course. Photo credit: Tony Pulsone If you had to pick one word to describe the Department of...
  • Oct. 24, 2013
    For most healthy bipeds, the act of walking is seldom given a second thought: One foot follows the other, and the rest of the body falls in line, supported by a system of muscle, tendon, and bones....
  • Sep. 17, 2013
    Assistant Professors Cullen Buie and Sangbae Kim of the Department of Mechanical Engineering both recently received a DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA), which was granted to 25 tenure-track faculty...
  • Jun. 26, 2013
      by Alissa Mallinson   Innovation and creativity are concepts that imbue everything we do in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. They’re woven into every lab, every experiment, every faculty...
  • Dec. 10, 2012
    Assistant Professor Sangbae Kim works on his lab’s current bioinspired project, the robotic cheetah. Photo Credit: M. Scott Brauer by Alissa Mallinson MIT’s Department of Mechanical...
  • Dec. 10, 2012
    Engineering Light-Activated Muscles   by Jennifer Chu, MIT News Office   Many robotic designs take nature as their muse: sticking to walls like geckos, swimming through water like tuna, sprinting...
  • Dec. 10, 2012
    The Micro Mass Spectrometer   by Alissa Mallinson   Photo credit: Tony Pulsone Professor Ian W. Hunter sat down with us recently to discuss one of his newest inventions, a miniature (“micro”)...
  • Dec. 5, 2011
    Tiny robots may monitor underground pipes for radioactive leaks.   A spherical robot equipped with a camera may navigate underground pipes of a nuclear reactor by propelling itself with an internal...
  • Dec. 5, 2011
      Domitilla Del Vecchio works on intelligent transportation systems that communicate to prevent collisions. What areas does your research focus on? Broadly speaking, my group works in control...

Pages