AI helps drone swarms navigate through crowded, unfamiliar spaces

Drone swarms frequently fly outside for a reason: it’s difficult for the robotic fliers to navigate in tight spaces without hitting each other. Caltech researchers may have a way for those drones to fly indoors, however. They’ve developed a machine l...

Eight US companies will manufacture NASA’s COVID-19 ventilator

Last month, the FDA rushed a NASA-designed ventilator through its fast-track Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) program in hopes that it might be used to treat COVID-19 patients. Caltech, which manages NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), offered t...

NASA will license its FDA-approved ventilator to manufacturers for free

A new high-pressure ventilator developed by NASA engineers and designed to treat COVID-19 has received FDA approval via a fast-tracked emergency use authorization. Now, NASA is looking for a medical industry partner to manufacture the device. It will...

CalTech’s new battery can draw energy from human sweat

The irony of a fitness tracker is that it can’t, because of battery limitations, track your fitness infinitely. Every few days, the tracker needs to be taken off, charged, and then be worn again. By that logic, is the wearable truly tracking your health and fitness? Or just 99% of your health and fitness?

The California Institute of Technology is working on an electronic skin, a sensor-filled sticker, that can turn human sweat into energy enough to power basic devices like heart-rate sensors, glucose-level trackers, or even a low-energy Bluetooth radio. These stickers work by harvesting ‘lactate’ from the sweat we produce. The lactate is absorbed by the electronic skin’s fuel cells – which are made from carbon nanotubes that host a platinum/cobalt catalyst and an enzyme that uses oxygen in the air to break down the lactate into water and a substance called pyruvate. CalTech’s researchers say these stickers can generate a continuous stream of energy (as much as “several milliwatts per square centimeter”), making it enough to offset the need for a battery, which the technology hopes to eventually replace.

While the technology isn’t completely ready to replace the battery on your Apple Watch, it’s promising to see that scientists are looking at ways of harvesting bio-energy to power health wearables. It is, in many ways, an extension of the innovation built into automatic watches that use the wearer’s movement to keep the timepiece running, or more specifically, something like the PowerWatch 2, which runs almost entirely on body-heat generated by the wearer.

Image Credits: CalTech

Scientists make jellyfish swim faster to prepare for deep-sea exploration

Scientists at Caltech and Stanford University want to turn jellyfish into deep-sea explorers that could be directed around the ocean, recording info as they travel. In a paper published in the journal Science Advances, the team explains how they've d...

NASA decommissions Spitzer Space Telescope after 16 years of service

NASA is flipping the switch on the Spitzer Space Telescope today. The observatory has made groundbreaking discoveries about the universe since its launch in 2003, from imaging some of the oldest stars in the universe to detecting the light reflected...

Watch a ‘transforming’ drone blast out of a cannon

Researchers launched a drone from a pneumatic baseball pitching machine strapped to a truck traveling 50 miles per hour. They hope this ballistic launch method might lead to drones that are better suited for emergency response and space exploration m...

This Drone Has Legs and Can Walk

I always thought the point of a drone was so it could fly around and do its work without having to touch the ground. But engineers from Caltech’s Center for Autonomous Systems & Technologies (CAST) have been working on an unusual drone which actually has legs.

The LEONARDO (LEg ON Aerial Robotic DrOne) uses its upper body thrust to stand upright, while a pair of jointed limbs at its bottom help it to walk along flat surfaces. Now I’m not quite sure what the real world application would be for a robot like this but there’s no question that it’s, uh… interesting to look at:

The only real value I can see in this design for a bipedal robot is that we’ll have more advance warning that they’re coming after us, thanks to the buzzing bee whine of their rotors.

[via iEEE Spectrum]