Harvard University

Personalized soft exosuit breaks new ground

Fully wearable soft exosuit with automatic tuning helps users save energy and walk outside over difficult terrain.

Forecasting earthquake aftershocks with AI

From hurricanes and floods to volcanoes and earthquakes, the Earth is continuously evolving in fits and spurts of dramatic activity. Earthquakes and subsequent tsunamis alone have caused massive destruction in the last decade.

Printing with sound

Harvard University researchers have developed a new printing method that uses sound waves to generate droplets from liquids with an unprecedented range of composition and viscosity. This technique could finally enable the manufacturing of many new biopharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and food and expand the possibilities of optical and conductive materials.

Material can store energy like an eagle's grip

What do a flea and an eagle have in common? They can store energy in their feet without having to continuously contract their muscles to then jump high or hold on to prey. Now scientists have created materials that can store energy this way, be squeezed repeatedly without damage, and even change shape if necessary.

Soft multifunctional robots get really small

Robots could be safely deployed in difficult-to-access environments, such as in delicate surgical procedures in the human body.

Gentle robotic hand for sea life

The open ocean is the largest and least explored environment on Earth, estimated to hold up to a million species that have yet to be described. However, many of those organisms are soft-bodied - like jellyfish, squid, and octopuses - and are difficult to capture for study with existing underwater tools, which all too frequently damage or destroy them. Now, a new device safely traps delicate sea creatures inside a folding polyhedral enclosure and lets them go without harm using a novel, origami-inspired design.

Rolls Royce swarm robots to inspect engines

An exciting vision of how robotics could be used to revolutionise the future of engine maintenance.

Ecology and AI

It's poised to transform fields from earthquake prediction to cancer detection to self-driving cars, and now scientists are unleashing the power of deep learning on a new field - ecology.

CRISPR's growing pains

In the six years since its inception, CRISPR gene editing has experienced ups and downs, from giddy excitement over the technology's potential to cure genetic diseases to patent disputes, ethical considerations and cancer scares.

Robotic cockroach can explore underwater environments

In nature, cockroaches can survive underwater for up to 30 minutes. Now, a robotic cockroach can do even better. Harvard's Ambulatory Microrobot, known as HAMR, can walk on land, swim on the surface of water, and walk underwater for as long as necessary, opening up new environments for this little bot to explore.

AI to identify, count, describe wild animals

Deep learning can automatically identify, count and describe animals in their natural habitats.

Mimicking human organs through bioengineering

Sensera Inc is adapting its technology for new applications in bioengineering. The company's MEMS, or MicroElectroMechanical Systems, technology is now being used at Harvard University in the creation of microfluidic devices, which mimic the functions of living human organs, including the lung, intestine, kidney, skin, bone marrow and blood-brain barrier.

Personalized bio-inks boost healing potential of printable body tissue

Researchers have incorporated platelet-rich plasma into a bio-ink: a 3-D-printed mixture of cells and gel that could eventually become the stuff of skin grafts and regenerative tissue implants.

A graphene roll-out

MIT engineers have developed a continuous manufacturing process that produces long strips of high-quality graphene.

Personalised robotic exosuits

When it comes to soft assistive devices — like the wearable exosuit being created by the Harvard Biodesign Lab — the wearer and the robot need to be in sync. But every human moves a bit differently, and tailoring the robot's parameters to an individual user is a time-consuming and inefficient process.

3D printing method embeds sensing capabilities in robotic actuators

Soft robots that can sense touch, pressure, movement and temperature.

Breakthroughs seen in artificial eye and muscle technology

Inspired by the human eye, researchers have developed an adaptive metalens that is essentially a flat, electronically controlled artificial eye. The adaptive metalens simultaneously controls for three of the major contributors to blurry images: focus, astigmatism, and image shift.

Snake-inspired robot uses kirigami to move

Who needs legs? With their sleek bodies, snakes can slither up to 14 miles-per-hour, squeeze into tight space, scale trees and swim. How do they do it? It's all in the scales.

3D printing of living cells

Using a new technique they call 'in-air microfluidics', scientists succeed in printing 3D structures with living cells. This special technique enable the fast and 'on-the-fly' production of micro building blocks that are viable and can be used for repairing damaged tissue, for example.

Rotational 3D printing technique yields high-performance composites

Nature has produced exquisite composite materials—wood, bone, teeth, and shells, for example—that combine light weight and density with desirable mechanical properties such as stiffness, strength and damage tolerance.