MIT News August 15, 2024 The use of wet chemistry in battery technologies limits their potential to be scaled down beyond millimeters in size. A team of researchers in the US (MIT, University of Pennsylvania, University of Michigan) photolithographically patterned a microscale zinc/platinum/SU-8 system to generate the highest energy density microbattery at the picoliter scale. The device scavenges ambient or solution-dissolved oxygen for a zinc oxidation reaction, achieving an energy density ranging from 760 to 1070 watt-hours per liter at scales below 100 micrometers lateral and 2 micrometers thickness in size. The processes allow 10,000 devices per wafer to be […]
Tag Archives: Micro robots
Resilient bug-sized robots keep flying even after wing damage
Science Daily March 15, 2023 Although robots driven by rigid actuators have demonstrated agile locomotion and manipulation, most of them lack animal-like robustness against unexpected damage. Dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs), a class of muscle-like soft transducers, have enabled nimble aerial, terrestrial, and aquatic robotic locomotion. However, unlike muscles, DEAs suffer local dielectric breakdowns that often cause global device failure. Researchers at MIT developed DEAs that can endure more than 100 punctures while maintaining high bandwidth and power density sufficient for supporting energetically expensive locomotion such as flight. They fabricated electroluminescent DEAs for visualizing electrode connectivity under actuator damage. When the […]
Insect-Inspired Vision System Helps Drones Pass Through Small Gaps
IEEE Spectrum September 11, 2018 Insects are quite good at not running into things, and just as good at running into things and surviving, but targeted, accurate precision flight is much more difficult for them. Reliable and not taking much to execute is one way to summarize the focus of the next generation of practical robotics. Researchers at the University of Maryland has developed a system that allows a drone to fly through very small and completely unknown gaps using a single camera and onboard processing. The drone has no information about the location or size of the gap in […]