News

Researchers at CU Boulder have developed an improved method for controlling smart tinting on windows that could make them cheaper, more effective and more durable than current options on the market.

Professor Yifu Ding is starting a new research project that explores how soft robots of the future could include new materials inspired by snakeskin.

Laura Devendorf, an assistant professor of information science with the ATLAS Institute, has been awarded a National Science Foundation CAREER award, providing $550,000 over five years to support the development of smart textiles. The award is one of the most prestigious given to faculty in the early phases of their careers.

CU Boulder is one of several funded teams in the Subterranean Challenge, a competition launched by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to stimulate and test ideas around autonomous robot use in difficult underground environments.

Assistant Professor Kaushik Jayaram sees nature as a giant catalogue of design ideas.

The human skin is an amazing organ, with distinct tactile “sensors” for pain or pressure as well as a vascular system for power. Body hair can be used for perception as well, with airflow around it allowing us to perceive objects and people at a distance. Assistant Professor Alessandro Roncone finds all of it inspiring, both for its compact and layered functionality, and for what it could teach us about the potential of robotics.

On this edition of On CUE, we're looking at two research projects at the college that could be transformational at both the individual and global levels.

Using relatively new methods, devices such as sensors can be manufactured quickly and cheaply and linked together easily, ushering in an era of connectivity today known as the internet of things. Researchers in the Multifunctional Materials Interdisciplinary Research Theme, however, are taking that idea in a new direction with what they call the internet of living things.

Correll: "In their search for killer apps, robotics companies should look at the amazing evolution of computers."

Associate Professor and IRT Member Mark Rentschler was interviewed for an article in the ASME Magazine.