Delivery Drones and Rotor-Powered Rideshares Sound Great—and Noisy

BU researchers with NASA funding will lead a multimillion-dollar, multi-institution project to help develop quieter vertical lift air vehicles By Andrew Thurston Forgot to order dinner or a birthday gift? Have a drone land an order on your doorstep. Need to hop a short distance from one city to another, but don’t want to wait […]

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New Bubble Popping Theory Could Help Track Ocean Pollution and Viruses

Bubbles are fun for everyone. But, it turns out, they can also be little menaces.

When a bubble pops, it can concentrate and aerosolize any particles stuck on it. Not a big deal when it’s a store-bought soapy bubble bursting in the yard or on your hand. But it’s a major concern when the particles it carries are potentially hazardous: bubbles caught in a crashing wave can send vaporized microplastics into the air where they might mess with the Earth’s atmosphere; bubbles burst by a flushing toilet can fling bacteria meters and onto nearby surfaces; a frothing cruise ship hot tub was once shown to be a Legionnaires’ disease super-spreader.

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Learning From Animal Behaviors to Inform Control Systems

Research by Distinguished Professor of Engineering John Bailleul questions how animals operate and how you might use animal behaviors to design control systems. By Margo Stanton You may be familiar with the term “blind as a bat”, which is used to describe someone who has poor eyesight. However, recent research on animal behavior by CISE […]

Bringing Hope to Ben

On a lifelong mission to help a childhood friend, Tim O’Shea is working on a new way to repair spinal cords By Patrick L. Kennedy Ben Harvey was an active fifteen-year-old. He was a rower, a swimmer—one of the fastest in the state of Queensland, Australia. And especially, he played rugby. In his hometown of […]

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Sabelhaus Research: Advancing the Safety of Soft Robots for Human Interactions

The emergence of soft robots will enable safe human interactions which will allow robots to assist in the industrial, medical, automotive and space industries. College of Engineering Professor Andrew Sabelhaus (ME, SE), has been working on making soft robots safer to improve these human interaction tasks, in areas such as medicine, as well as explore difficult or dangerous locations. His work will help improve the design of many other soft robots.

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