MIT researchers have developed a robotic cheetah that can run at 10 miles per hour and jump more than a foot in the air, reports Lily Hay Newman for Slate. “Breakthroughs in the cheetah’s development could be applicable to other autonomous robots or things like prosthetics,” she writes.
Francie Diep writes for Popular Science about a soft robot designed by MIT’s Distributed Systems Lab, that is able to navigate a maze unaided: “Researchers that build soft robots like this one hope that in the future, soft machines will be safer for humans to work with than hard metal ones.”
“[B]y current robotics standards this MIT creation is a pretty sleek approximation of a cheetah,” writes Rachel Feltman for The Washington Post about Professor Sangbae Kim’s robotic cheetah. A new algorithm could eventually allow the robot to reach speeds of 30 miles per hour.
“Leave it to researchers from MIT to come up with a complex algorithm that’s specific to predatory motions like running, leaping, and bounding that can be programmed into a robot,” writes Steve Annear for Boston Magazine about the robotic cheetah developed by Professor Sangbae Kim’s team.
Nidhi Subbaraman of BetaBoston writes about a soft, tentacle-shaped robot created by the Distributed Systems Lab at MIT that is able to navigate autonomously. “[T]he robot can make its way from one side of a pipe maze to another without humans getting involved,” writes Subbaraman.
Time features this video of the robot cheetah developed by Professor Sangbae Kim’s team. The researchers developed an algorithm that allows the four-legged robot to run untethered up to 10 miles per hour and jump over obstacles.
A team of MIT researchers has developed an algorithm that will help NASA crews clean up debris in space, reports Nick Stockton for Wired. The research will allow crews to clear pieces of satellites spinning so wildly that they would typically be dangerous to collect.
In the new book “Innovative Women: The Changing Face of Technology,” MIT alumna and U.S. Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith co-authors a chapter about how to increase opportunities for women in technology. In an excerpt provided to Fortune, Smith writes that we’re at a “tipping point” and about to accelerate the path to lasting gender equality.
Nidhi Subbaraman of BetaBoston reports that MIT researchers have proposed a new solar-powered, desalination system for purifying groundwater. “Wright and Winter argue that for the low levels of salt in the groundwater in up to 60 percent of rural India, they can extract enough power from solar panels to run their electrodialysis setup,” writes Subbaraman.
Bloomberg News reports that MIT alumna Megan Smith has been appointed as the White House Chief Technology Officer. In her new role, Smith will serve as a liaison between the White House and Silicon Valley companies, and advise the government on how to better use technology.
Writing for Wired, Issie Lapowsky reports that MIT graduate Megan Smith has been named the White House Chief Technology Officer. “In addition to being a gifted programmer and technologist, Smith has been one of the country’s leading advocates in the movement to get more women into tech jobs,” writes Lapowsky.
New Scientist reporter Paul Marks writes about how MIT researchers are developing self-guided robots to help assess the danger posed by space debris. "Aboard the ISS we are now working on cooperative debris inspection, where more than one of the robots has cameras," says Alvar Saenz-Otero.
In a piece published by The Huffington Post about a new time travel simulation, Lee Billings highlights Professor Seth Lloyd’s work developing a new model for a “closed timelike curve,” or a loop that could be traveled back into time.
Lina Zeldovich of The Atlantic writes about how Prof. Eric Alm and one of his graduate students tracked their bacterial fluctuations for a year to better understand how daily activities influenced their microbiome. “We just don’t know much about the functional role of any of these bugs,” says Alm.
Writing for CNBC, Hazma Ali reports on new MIT research showing that humans prefer to receive orders from robots rather than humans. "Our findings showed that our subjects strongly preferred when the robot scheduled the work of the team,” explains graduate student Matthew Gombolay.