IEEE Spectrum: ‘Microdrones That Cooperate to Transport Objects Could Be Future of Warehouse Automation’

Following up on an earlier story about the GRASP lab’s new swarming technology that uses only onboard cameras and sensors, IEEE Spectrum’s Evan Ackerman checks back in with GRASP research scientist Giuseppe Loianno to talk about another advance.

Y-Prize Startup VisiPlate is Opening Eyes and Attracting Funding

VisiPlate, a nanotechnology-based medical device for glaucoma patients, got its start as the winner of the 2017 Y-Prize. The competition tasks students with transforming early-stage Penn Engineering technologies into viable businesses. Team VisiPlate selected the nanoscopically thin plates developed by Igor Bargatin, Class of 1965 Term Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics, and […]

IEEE Spectrum: ‘This Autonomous Quadrotor Swarm Doesn’t Need GPS’

The GRASP Lab’s flying robots do some amazing things under the invisible glow of PERCH’s motion-tracking camera system, but to have an impact in the real world, they will need to figure out where they’re going without that kind of eye-in-the-sky. Enter VIO-Swarm, the latest set of collaborative quadrotors from the lab, which fly together […]

Penn Engineering students are featured in Philly.com’s “Disney college contest yields careers as ‘imagineers'”

MEAM Alumni Receive Prestigious Research Honors

Oscar Lopez-Pamies (Ph.D., 2006) is the 2017 Young Investigator Award from the Society of Engineering Science. This award recognizes Professor Lopez-Pamies’ seminal contributions to the understanding of cavitation phenomena in rubber and the elastic dielectric behavior of filled elastomers by means of novel iterative homogenization techniques as well as the development of effective constitutive model […]

Lou Soslowsky Wins the ASME Lissner Medal

Lou Soslowsky, Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery and MEAM Graduate Group member, is the recipient of the 2018 American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Lissner Medal “for outstanding contributions toward the understanding, prevention and treatment of musculoskeletal injuries to tendinous and ligamentous tissues; and for internationally recognized leadership in the biomechanics community.” The H.R. Lissner Medal is […]

Engineers As Artists

If Penn students were asked in a random campus survey to describe their individual skillsets and learning styles as either “left brain” (analytical, qualitative) or “right brain” (artistic, intuitive), the majority would most likely answer by naming one cerebral hemisphere or the other. An exceptional and talented few would be able to reply, “both.”

These small robots are inspired by origami

Roboticist Cynthia Sung has been doing origami since she was young. She says she was always excited by the possibility of taking something two-dimensional and folding it into a three-dimensional object that can move. Through origami, an ordinary, flat sheet of paper can become a talking frog or a crane that can flap its wings. […]

Teaching Robots to ‘Feel with Their Eyes’

At first glance, Alex Burka, a Ph.D. student in Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, looks like a ghostbuster. He walks into the Penn Bookstore strapped to a bulky orange backpack, holding a long, narrow instrument with various sensors attached.

Exploring new worlds: Penn students design an ice drilling robot for Mars

Wanda Lipps, Gautam Nagaraj, and Michael Gromis, all students in Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science who graduated this past spring, watched as a large drill, supported by a boxy metal frame, dug down into a container of dirt and ice. The students, members of the Mars Water Horizons team at Penn, were testing […]