Category Archives: Research

Structural Batteries Pave Way for Light, Energy-Efficient Vehicles

When cars, planes, ships or computers are built from a material that functions as both a battery and a load-bearing structure, the weight and energy consumption are radically reduced. A research group at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden is now presenting a world-leading advance in so-called massless energy storage – a structural battery that could halve the weight of a laptop, make the mobile phone as thin as a credit card or increase the driving range of an electric car by up to 70 percent on a single charge. Continue reading

Crash-Perching on Vertical Poles with a Hugging-Wing Robot

Perching with winged Unmanned Aerial Vehicles has often been solved by means of complex control or intricate appendages.  Mohammad Askari, Michele Benciolini, Hoang-Vu Phan, William Stewart & Dario Floreano, researchers at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland, present a method that relies on passive wing morphing for crash-landing on trees and other types of vertical poles: Continue reading