aboutSample Research Projects
CityCar, a stackable, electric, environmentally friendly, shared-use, two-passenger city vehicle that integrates with a city’s existing transportation infrastructure and power grid to change the way we travel in dense urban areas.
Death and the Powers, an innovative and unusual opera scored for an ensemble of specially designed Hyperinstruments, and a robotic, animatronic stage—the first of its kind—that will gradually “come alive” as a main character in the drama.
The world’s first powered ankle-foot prosthesis, which successfully mimics the elegance of nature, propelling the wearer forward with each step, and providing mechanical behavior closer to natural walking, increasing both speed and normality of gait for amputees.
A wearable Emotional-Social Intelligence Prosthesis that helps those with autism understand and read social cues by analyzing and categorizing facial reactions.
The Huggable, a robotic teddy bear for use in children’s hospitals, nursing homes, or for early education. Equipped with full-body sensate skin and a series of sensors, it responds to a person’s presence and touch, and can act as a medical monitoring device.
New tools for analysis and engineering of brain circuits—work that will help develop new strategies for systematically repairing damage or malfunction, augmenting cognition, and revealing insights into human brain function.
The Human Speechome Project, an ambitious attempt to unravel the mystery of how humans naturally acquire language within the context of their primary social set-ting by studying one child, from birth to age three, for nearly all of his waking hours. The project will yield some 400,000 hours of audio and video data that will be stored in a massive petabyte (one million gigabyte) disk storage system.
Scratch, a new programming toolkit that makes it easier for kids to manipulate graphics, images, and sounds to create animated stories, video games, and interactive art. Just as children can build physical structures with LEGO, they can “construct” computer creations with Scratch.
CargoNet, a low-cost sensor node for supply-chain monitoring that includes micropower analog processing, RFID-reader wake-up, multiple sensor modalities, and micropower operation that extends battery life to multiple years.
