EECSenergy Research

EECS professor Marc A. Baldo and his team have developed a novel ‘solar concentrator’ that promises to raise the efficiency of current solar panel systems by 50% and to make possible, within the next three years, the affordable production of energy-producing windows and solar panels based on these new concepts for solar concentration. This development will offer a major contribution in the effort to build attractive alternatives to current fossil-fuel dependence for electric energy production and reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions.

The Baldo team, including EECS graduate students Michael Currie, Jon Mapel, and Timothy Heidel, and Research Lab of Electronics postdoctoral associate Shalom Goffri reported their findings in Science, June 11, 2008.


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EECS Robot Locomotion Research

Walking robots dynamically traverse "extreme" terrain As a part of the DARPA Learning Locomotion project, the CSAIL Robot Locomotion Group under the direction of EECS Prof. Russ Tedrake has been designing robust control strategies for a small quadruped robot to dynamically traverse rough terrain containing obstacles with heights comparable to the leg length of the robot.

The video seen on the EECS homepage spotlight demonstrates a rare combination of careful foot placements and aggressive dynamic movements, all generated by the same machinery. The robot, called LittleDog, is built by Boston Dynamics and operates in a motion capture environment with "known" terrain; the hope is that this technology will transition to the BigDog robot in the near future in order to improve its capabilities for negotiating "extreme" terrain. Project team members include MIT graduate students Katie Byl (MechE) and Alec Shkolnik (EECS) and CSAIL software engineer Sam Prentice.

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nanoEECS Research

EECS Prof. Jing Kong, with MIT Materials Science Prof. Francesco Stellacci and EECS postdoctoral associate Jikang Yuan have have created a membrane that can absorb up to 20 times its weight in oil, and can be recycled many times for future use. The oil itself can also be recovered. Some 200,000 tons of oil have already been spilled at sea since the start of the decade.

The team has created a paper towel like material from an interwoven mesh of nanowires that is able to selectively absorb hydrophobic liquids--oil-like liquids--from water. Their work was reported in the May 30, 2008 issue of Nature Nanotechnology.

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EECS Research: Image-Recognition

EECS Prof. Antonio Torralba and his team, including EECS Prof. William Freeman have been developing very short codes or numerical representations that can be derived from individual images to enable automated cataloging of the billions of images on the Internet. Current to future applications of this work range from automatic indexing of digital images through downloadable software to making true machine vision possible in the future--enabling robots to make sense of visual (numeric) data from their cameras and use this to locate themselves.

Torralba's image data system will provide representation of a set of 12.9 million images from the Internet with just 600 megabytes of data--now available online and small enough to fit in the RAM memory of most current PCs and/or stored on a memory stick.

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EECSenergy: Intelligent Lighting Control

The prevalence of electric discharge illumination has led us to consider ways to inexpensively use discharge lamps to enhance energy savings in buildings, both through lighting optimization and through "non-conventional" uses of the ubiquitous fluorescent lamp fixture. We are exploring a wide range of research to add functionality and energy savings to the lighting infrastructure. For example, we have developed a proximity sensing lamp ballast that can detect the presence of people near the light. The ballast can automatically dim and brighten lighting as people move through a building. In sparsely populated areas, a person travels in a "pool" of light. We are also developing ballasts that modulate the arc in a lamp, permitting the lamp to transmit information optically while retaining conventional illumination capability.

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bioEECS: C. Elegans studies--live on a chip

EECS Professor Mehmet Fatih Yanik and collaborators Fei Zeng, posdoctoral associate in the Research Lab of Electronics and EECS graduate student Christopher Rohde have devised a technique to render the long- studied C. elegans worm--one of the tiniest multi- cellular organisms known--in a motionless state for long enough (several minutes) to conduct 3-D imaging at sub-cellular resolution and even to reliably operate with laser surgery to study neural degeneration and regeneration on the chip.. Yanik’s team had previously demonstrated that neural regeneration can be studied in C. elegans using femtosecond laser micro-surgery.

This advance could ultimately help researchers better understand the genetic underpinnings of regeneration in the nervous system--in higher vertebrate organisms including humans. That, in turn could help in treatments of neural injuries and diseases such as parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

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