berkeley

The latest creation from University of California at Berkeley's robotics researchers draws its inspiration from that seemingly indestructible insect: the cockroach.

Known as DASH Plus Wings, it scampers along at 1.3 meters per second and climbs 17-degree inclines. (DASH stands for Dynamic Autonomous Sprawled Hexapod.) The researchers hope that some day, with further development, the robots used in large numbers could aid in search efforts for survivors of disasters such as earthquakes. … Read more

You might not need a whole 1.21 gigawatts to travel through time, after all.

Computer engineers at the University of California at Berkeley have found a way to reduce the minimum voltage required to store a charge in a capacitor--an electron-storing device that works somewhat like a battery--paving the way for ultra-low-power computing. This is a result of a project started in 2008 and led by Asif Khan, a UC Berkeley electrical engineering graduate student, and Sayeef Salahuddin, a UC Berkeley assistant professor of electrical engineering.

The engineers took advantage of ferroelectrics, a class of materials that can hold both positive and negative electric charges, even when there's no voltage applied. On top of that, the electrical polarization in ferroelectrics can be reversed with an external electric field.

The team was able to demonstrate that when a capacitor made of ferroelectric-based materials was paired with an electric insulator, the charge accumulated for a given voltage could be amplified in a phenomenon called "negative capacitance." This means you can create a charge that would normally require a higher voltage. And this, when applied to transistors--the on-off switch components that generate the zeros and ones that are the core of binary computing used in all personal computers--would translate into lower minimum voltage required to operate a computer processor. … Read more

Austin Whitney graduated from UC Berkeley just last month, and he already has a full-time job. Whitney works as a human lab rat.

The 22-year-old paraplegic, who captured headlines recently when he walked across the stage at his commencement wearing bionic legs, now spends long days with the engineers who developed the customized robotic suit. He passionately believes in the device and its potential to alter the lives of those with spinal cord injuries, and he wants to do whatever he can to help perfect the prototype--for himself and others like him.

"We want to make the Model T version of an exoskeleton," Whitney told CNET. "There are health benefits to mobility. It's good for the circulatory and muscular systems, and there's a social and mental benefit. Four years ago, I thought I was going to die on a hospital bed."

That was 2007, when Whitney was 18 years old and got into a car accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down.

"The spinal cord injury meant I would likely never walk again," he said. But he did, taking his first public steps in four years at a graduation ceremony at Edwards Track Stadium on May 7 (see the video below).

During the nine months prior, however, he had experimented with walking in a custom-fit robotic device developed on campus in the lab of mechanical engineering professor Professor Homayoon Kazerooni, who is also founder of Berkeley Bionics. That company makes the eLegs robotic exoskeleton, which is currently undergoing trials and is expected to become available to rehabilitation centers by the end of the year, with a personal version for sale for an as-yet-undisclosed price in 2013.

A friend who plays wheelchair basketball with Whitney told him about Kazerooni, one of a number of innovators around the world devoted to developing robotic exoskeletons for wheelchair users. After speaking with him on the phone, Whitney decided to visit the Berkeley Robotics and Human Engineering Laboratory. "It is like something out of a movie set--exoskeletons hanging from the walls everywhere," he said.

It's inside that lab where Whitney does most of his walking these days, though he does on occasion roam the campus in his bionic suit. He has degrees in history and political science, and plans to attend law school in the fall of 2012. But for now, he spends about six hours a day, from noon to 6 p.m., working (for pay) in the lab. … Read more

Editor's note: This is the fifth story in an ongoing series profiling college graduates throughout the United States as they hunt for technology jobs. Click here for CNET's special report, "Wanted: A job in tech."

Imagine your professional future on the line, and a group of six people you hardly know standing between you and a great job.

With national unemployment at 9 percent, and the economy still teetering between a double-dip recession and a very modest recovery, you could forgive Thomas Schluchter for being anxious as he readied for what might prove to be one … Read more

If you're a commuter stuck in traffic, it doesn't help you all that much to know what road conditions are like right now. You already know you're being delayed. But what if there was a way to alert you to problems before you even get in your car?

That's the premise behind a new project being announced tonight by IBM Research, the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), and the University of California at Berkeley's California Center for Innovative Transportation (CCIT).

The idea behind the project is simple: as a commuter, you're better off if … Read more

It's inspiring to visit a university laboratory and see fresh-faced college students working on experiments that may some day have huge impacts on our lives. And on our trip to the University of California at Berkeley this week we found just that. In the campus' Stanley Hall, there's a team of researchers working on a new blood-analysis chip or Self-powered Integrated Microfluidic Blood Analysis System (SIMBAS), that can potentially detect hundreds of diseases at once in a matter of minutes.

During my campus visit with cameraman and editor Jared Kohler, we interviewed bioengineering Professor Luke Lee and post-doctoral … Read more

Amanda Boxtel hasn't walked since a skiing accident left her paralyzed nearly two decades ago.

In the video below, she stands and walks for the first time in 18 years using eLegs, a 45-pound wearable robotic exoskeleton aimed at getting paraplegics out of their wheelchairs and onto their feet. It's an amazing sight.

"To take my first step in the eLegs was just astounding," Boxtel says with tears in her eyes, "because I bent my knee for the first time in 18 years and I placed my heel on the ground. And then I transferred … Read more

The dream of having a robot do the dishes may get a step closer with a touch-sensitive electronic skin made of flexible sensors, according to engineers at University of California at Berkeley. And presumably, it wouldn't get dishpan hands.

In a letter published by Nature Materials, the researchers describe a low-power but robust material that would have some of the properties of human skin, such as the ability to feel and touch. Such artificial skin might also help restore limb feeling to amputees.

The e-skin is based on inorganic single crystalline semiconductors. The engineers including Ali Javey and Kuniharu Takei grew germanium/silicon nanowires on a cylinder and then rolled them onto a polyimide film substrate, depositing the wires in a pattern.

The result was a shiny, thin, and flexible electronic material organized into a matrix of transistors, each of which with hundreds of semiconductor nanowires.

A pressure-sensitive rubber was added to the surface of the matrix for sensing. It has the ability to detect pressure from 0 to 15 kilopascals, equivalent to the force needed to grasp light objects. A robot with e-skin hands could handle wine glasses without breaking them.

To show how it can detect pressure, a rubber mold in the shape of the letter C (for "Cal") was placed over the matrix, and about 15 kilopascals of pressure was applied. As seen in the study, the matrix pixels imaged the pressure profile into a blurry but recognizable C.

E-skin for robot applications is under development by other groups, including an MIT-Peratech partnership working on spiky metallic nanoparticles. DARPA, which helped sponsor the Berkeley research, has a Revolutionizing Prosthetics program that is investigating the creation of synthetic skin to improve artificial limbs. … Read more

Humans may have naturally occurring nanotechnology to thank for partially cleaning up the oil spill from BP's Deepwater Horizon rig.

Researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have found that previously undiscovered ocean floor microbes have literally risen to the occasion and begun degrading the giant underwater oil plume in the Gulf of Mexico.

While there was belief that some ocean microbes might aid in the degradation of the oil spill, the process has happened more aggressively than anyone predicted it would, according to a report from environmental biotechnologists at the Berkeley Lab.

One of the giant oil plumes that formed … Read more