When a team of MIT students showed up at a national robotics tournament, their robot – aptly named Timbot – didn’t work. They were invited to demonstrate Timbot at the launch event United States Governors Cup in Washington, D.C., a March Madness-style competition that featured high school robotics teams from all 50 states.

Solving problems on the fly is a given at robotics tournaments. Timbot had a few technical issues, mainly with Wi-Fi, so the team sat cross-legged on the floor and got to work. Meanwhile, high school students began to gather and ask questions about the cabling and subsystems. After about an hour, Timbot was working againcollecting and throwing foam balls as intended.

“It really was a great moment,” says freshman Lily Sand. “We ended up connecting the robot with a long Ethernet cable instead of using a wireless connection, and many of the students thought, ‘Oh, we do that too!’ It was a nice touchpoint.”

Using a cultural touchstone for good

Getting younger students interested in robotics is one of the goals of MIT students as members of a up-to-date club, FIRSTxMYTHwhich started at the beginning of the academic year. All members are graduates of programs offered by FIRST Robotics (FIRST), a nonprofit organization dedicated to sparking interest in STEM among primary and secondary school students around the world through team robotics programs and competitions.

FIRST has deep roots at MIT. Inventor Dean Kamen worked with the overdue MIT professor Woodie Flowers, a pioneer of hands-on engineering design education, to establish the FIRST Robotics Competition in 1992. The competition was modeled after the inventive robotics competition that Flowers developed for his Iconic Mechanical Engineering Class 2.70 (Introduction to Design)i.e. currently 2,007 (Design and production I).

With FIRST, students learn more than just designing, building and programming robots. The program emphasizes an ethos of “gracious professionalism” – a term coined by Flowers to describe high quality work, respect and cooperation, even in a competitive context. Students also build self-confidence, gain leadership experience, and improve communication skills as well as technical knowledge.

Many FIRST graduates feel a deep sense of gratitude for the program and a mighty desire to remain involved. Debbie Ang, co-founder of FIRSTxMIT, continues to mentor the team at her high school in Modern Hampshire. However, there are few FIRST alumni clubs on campus. Ang and co-founder Perry Han, also a sophomore, met in high school for FIRST and reconnected at MIT. “We noticed that FIRST was founded here, and yet there was nothing organized on campus, even though we kept meeting people who had founded FIRST and still cared about the community,” he explains.

In fact, participation in FIRST is something of a cultural touchstone among MIT students. MIT Associate Director of Admissions Trinidad Carney, a liaison to FIRST Robotics, estimates that 15 to 20 percent of students have participated in the program.

Han and Ang worked with Carney to launch FIRSTxMIT under the auspices Edgerton Centerto strengthen connections among the MIT FIRST community and provide members with the opportunity to channel their passion for FIRST into outreach and public service. Their hunch about the untapped potential of the alumni club was spot on: the kick-off event attracted 185 students, and they have about 200 on their Discord channel.

Sharing the “Power of the FIRST”

Now the club is not operating. They organized a meeting for Modern England FIRST alumni; worked with Josiah Quincy Elementary School in Boston to launch the LEGO Robotics League; volunteered as a judge at local competitions; and helped the MIT Admissions Office get there. Carney, who serves as the club’s advisor, says, “We’ve actually had other universities reach out to us and say, ‘How did MIT manage to launch a club that’s so successful and so exciting?'”

One of the club’s most ambitious undertakings to date was building Timbotin three days, in January, during the Independent Activity Period. Robot in 3 Days (Ri3D) is a collegial challenge in which students build THE FIRST Robotic Competition-level robot in 72 hours, which would take a high school team about six weeks. Experimental roboticsThe consortium, which uses an experiential robotics platform to promote engineering and public service, provided support for MIT’s Ri3D challenge and invited the team to serve as STEM ambassadors at the Governors Cup.

In addition to the robotics competition, the two-day event brought together governors and leaders from government, education, industry and others to highlight the critical role states play in supporting STEM education.

To this end, the FIRSTxMIT team demonstrated Timbot, spoke to high school students, staffed the MIT recruiting booth, and met with VIPs, sharing the value of project-based STEM enrichment opportunities like FIRST. “Having MIT students tell the story of the power of FIRST is incredibly compelling,” says Carney. “They can say, ‘I did this in high school, it made me who I am, and now I’m at MIT still building and giving back.’

Many governors stopped by the MIT recruiting booth to talk to students, including Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey. “She talked about the importance of STEM education in primary and secondary schools and was very supportive,” says Sand, logistics coordinator at FIRSTxMIT.

In addition to inspiring others, MIT students were inspired by the Governors Cup themselves. Han recalls a conversation with a state senator from Ohio, a former teacher and mighty supporter of programs like FIRST. “It really showed me that if you have people in government who are excited about STEM education, it can really be a success.”

Building a better future

Looking to the future, Han and Ang plan to spend some time further refining the club’s organization and future goals. Practical information activities occupy an crucial place in their plans. “FIRST places a strong emphasis on starting new teams, supporting underprivileged communities and spreading awareness,” says Ang. “Many of us feel FIRST has played an important role in shaping our academic and career paths, so we want to give that opportunity to others.”

“Part of our goal is to put the robot in the hands of as many students as possible to kind of give them a sense that STEM is not just about reading an AP Physics C-Mechanics textbook,” Han adds. “It’s actually putting those ideas into action and building something useful.”

They also have no shortage of up-to-date ideas to explore. Han is particularly interested in encouraging students to earn credits through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program or coursework credit for projects such as Ri3D, as well as encouraging students in the Gordon Engineering Leadership Program to gain leadership recognition through mentoring the robotics team. He also wants to explore how to leverage FIRST alumni networks to aid students develop professionally.

Regardless of the path they choose, Carney has no doubt that they are making an impact. She saw their full potential when they built Timbot.

“These students, many of whom had never met before, came from different backgrounds: different schools, different regions, with different life experiences,” he says. “But they worked together with respect, curiosity, and generosity. They are collaborative, mission-driven, and passionate about creating opportunities for others. They make MIT better and will make the future better.”

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In the aftermath of a devastating earthquake, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can fly through a collapsed building to map the scene and give rescuers the information they need to quickly reach survivors.

However, this remains an extremely challenging problem for an autonomous robot, which would need to quickly adjust its trajectory to avoid sudden obstacles while staying on course.

Researchers from MIT and the University of Pennsylvania have developed a modern trajectory planning system that addresses both challenges simultaneously. Their technique enables the UAV to react to obstacles within milliseconds while maintaining a velvety flight path, which minimizes travel time.

Their system uses a modern mathematical formulation that ensures the robot will safely reach its destination along a feasible path, while requiring less computation than other techniques. In this way, it generates smoother trajectories faster than state-of-the-art methods.

The trajectory planner is also powerful enough to enable real-time flight using only the robot’s onboard computer and sensors.

The open-source system, called MIGHTY, does not require proprietary software packages that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. It can be more easily implemented in a wider range of real-world settings.

In addition to search and rescue, MIGHTY can be used for applications such as last-mile deliveries in urban spaces, where UAVs must avoid buildings, wires and people, or for industrial inspections of convoluted structures such as wind turbines.

“MIGHTY achieves comparable or better performance by using only open source tools, which means that any researcher, student, or company – anywhere in the world – can use it freely. By removing this cost barrier, MIGHTY helps democratize high-performance trajectory planning and opens the door to a much broader community that can leverage this work,” says Kota Kondo, an aeronautics and astronautics graduate student and lead author of the paper on this planning tool trajectory.

In the article, Kondo is joined by Yuwei Wu, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania; Vijay Kumar, professor at UPenn; and senior author Jonathan P. How, Ford Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and principal investigator at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) and the Aerospace Control Laboratory (ACL) at MIT. Tests appears in .

Overcoming compromises

When Kondo was a child, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident occurred after the Great East Japan Earthquake. After school was canceled, Kondo stayed home and watched the news every day while workers surveyed and secured the reactor site. Some workers still had to enter hazardous areas to contain the damage and assess the situation, exposing them to high doses of radioactive materials.

“I was passionate about creating autonomous robots that can enter dynamic and dangerous situations and then come back and report back to humans who stay out of danger,” Kondo says.

This task requires a good trajectory planning tool, which is software that determines the path the robot should follow to get from point A to point B safely.

However, many existing systems impose trade-offs that limit performance.

Although some commercial systems can quickly generate velvety trajectories, they can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Open source alternatives are often weaker compared to commercial solutions or challenging to exploit.

With MIGHTY, Kondo and his colleagues have developed an open-source system that generates high-quality, velvety trajectories by responding to obstacles in real time and that runs speedy enough to fly using only on-board components.

To do this, they overcame a key challenge that limits many open source systems.

These methods usually first estimate how long it will take the robot to get from point A to point B. Based on the estimated travel time, the planner finds the best way to reach the destination.

Although using a fixed travel time allows the planner to quickly generate a trajectory, it has drawbacks. First, if the UAV needs to move very far away from obstacles to avoid obstacles, it may have to boost its speed to meet the set travel time budget. This makes it challenging to avoid sudden threats.

A STRONG method

Instead, MIGHTY uses a mathematical technique called the Hermite spline, which optimizes travel time and flight path in one step, creating a velvety trajectory that can be precisely controlled.

“Combined optimization of the spatial and temporal components allows us to get better results, but now the optimization is so large that it is more difficult to solve in the possible time,” Kondo says.

The researchers used a clever technique to reduce this computational overhead.

Instead of generating a trajectory from scratch every time, MIGHTY pre-guesses the trajectory. It then refines the trajectory through iterative optimization using the scene map generated by the UAV’s lidar sensors.

“We can reasonably guess what the trajectory should be, which is much faster than generating the whole thing from nothing,” Kondo says.

This allows MIGHTY to react in real time to unknown obstacles, while maintaining a velvety trajectory and minimizing travel time. The system uses on-board UAV components, which is crucial in applications where the robot can move far from the base station.

In simulated experiments, MIGHTY required only about 90 percent of the computational time required by state-of-the-art methods and safely arrived at the target about 15 percent faster than those approaches.

When they tested the system on real robots, it reached speeds of 6.7 meters per second, avoiding every obstacle that came in its path.

“With MIGHTY, everything is integrated into one whole. There is no need to communicate with any other software to find a solution. This allows us to work even faster than some commercial solutions,” says Kondo.

In the future, researchers want to improve MIGHTY so it can be used to control multiple robots at once and conduct more flight experiments in challenging environments. They hope to continue to improve the open source system based on user feedback.

“MIGHTY makes an crucial contribution to agile robot navigation by rethinking the trajectory representation itself. Hermite splines have already been used successfully in visual simultaneous localization and mapping, and it is nice to see that their advantages are now being exploited for trajectory planning in mobile robots. By enabling joint optimization of path geometry, time, velocity and acceleration while retaining local control over the trajectory, MIGHTY gives robots greater freedom to calculate speedy, dynamically feasible movements in cluttered environments,” says Davide Scaramuzza, professor and director of the Robotics and Perception Group at the University of Zurich, who was not involved in this research.

This research was funded in part by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the Defense Science and Technology Agency in Singapore.

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MIT student Sunshine Jiang ’25 and Rupert Li ’24 are the recipients of this year’s Knight-Hennessy Scholarship. Now in its ninth year, this highly competitive scholarship provides financial support for graduate study at Stanford University for up to three years.

Sunlit Jiang ’25

Sunshine Jiang of Hangzhou, China, graduated from MIT in 2025 with a bachelor’s degree with a double major in physics and electrical engineering and computer science, as well as minors in mathematics and economics. He will graduate this month with a master’s degree in engineering and will begin doctoral studies in computer science at the Stanford School of Engineering in the fall.

Jiang is engaged in artificial intelligence and robotics research, developing productive and adaptive data-efficient systems for general-purpose robots that augment accessibility. She has presented her research at major conferences, including the Conference on Robotic Learning, the International Conference on Robotics and Automation, and the International Conference on Learning Representations.

Jiang led the development of AI-powered systems that provide access to customary Chinese arts in rural classrooms, founded cross-country programs that expand girls’ access to STEM education, and created a Covid-19 document amplifying community voices that was featured on China Daily.

Rupert Lee ’24

Rupert Li of Portland, Oregon, is currently pursuing a PhD in mathematics at the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences. He graduated from MIT in 2024 with a bachelor’s degree, double majoring in mathematics and computer science, economics and data science. In addition to his bachelor’s degree, he also earned a master’s degree in data analytics. Li then traveled to the UK as a Marshall Scholar, where he obtained a master’s degree in mathematics from the University of Cambridge.

Li’s research interests include probability, discrete geometry, and combinatorics. He enjoys serving as a mentor for MIT PRIMES-USA, the high school mathematics research program, and was previously an advisor for Duluth REU, the undergraduate mathematics research program. In addition to the Knight-Hennessy and Marshall Scholarships, he received the Hertz Fellowship, the PD Soros Fellowship and the Goldwater Scholarship, and received the distinction of receiving the Frank and Brennie Morgan Award.

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Under a microscope, a bouquet of lollipop-like structures, each smaller than a grain of sand, gently undulates in a Petri dish of liquid. Suddenly they snap together like the jaws of a flycatcher as the scientist waves a miniature magnet over the plate. What was previously a collection of small passive structures immediately transformed into an energetic robotic gripper.

The Lollipop gripper is one demonstration of a modern type of cushioned magnetic hydrogel developed by MIT engineers and their collaborators at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland and the University of Cincinnati. In the study will appear in the magazine today MIT team reports a modern method for printing and producing a gel that can be transformed into convoluted, magnetically activated three-dimensional structures.

The modern gel could form the basis of cushioned, microscopic, magnetically responsive robots and materials. Such magnobots could be used in medicine, for example to release drugs or take biopsies under the influence of an external magnet.

Setting objects in motion using magnets is nothing modern, at least on a macro scale. For example, we can wave a fridge magnet over a stack of paper clips, which will follow the magnet in response. At the microscale, scientists have designed a variety of magnetic “micro-swimmers” – pieces smaller than a millimeter that can be remotely guided by a magnet to squeeze through miniature spaces. For the most part, these designs work by mixing magnetic particles with a printable resin and attracting the entire float toward an external magnet.

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Robot-assembled building blocks may be a more environmentally cordial method of building large-scale structures than some existing construction techniques, according to a fresh study by MIT researchers.

The team conducted a feasibility study to evaluate the effectiveness of constructing a plain building using “voxels,” which are modular 3D subunits that can be assembled into convoluted, tough structures.

After examining how multiple voxels work, scientists have developed three fresh designs to improve building design. They also created a robotic assembler and a user-friendly interface for generating voxel-based building plans and instructing the robots.

Their results indicate that this voxel-based robotic assembly system can reduce carbon content – ​​all the carbon emitted over the life cycle of building materials – by as much as 82 percent compared to popular techniques such as 3D concrete printing, modular precast concrete and steel frames. The system would also be competitive in terms of costs and construction time. However, the choice of materials used to produce voxels plays a major role in their carbon footprint and costs.

While scalability, durability, long-term reliability and essential issues such as fire resistance still need to be investigated before such a system can be widely deployed, the researchers say these preliminary results highlight the potential of this approach for automated on-site construction.

“I’m particularly excited about how robotic assembly of discrete meshes can practically apply digital manufacturing to the built environment in a way that will allow us to build much more efficiently and sustainably,” says Miana Smith, a graduate student at MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) and lead author of the study.

She is joined in this article by Paul Richard, a graduate of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland and former visiting scientist at MIT; Alfonso Parra Rubio, CBA graduate; and senior author Neil Gershenfeld, MIT professor and director of CBA. Tests appears in .

Designing better building blocks

Over the past few years, researchers from the Bits and Atoms Center have been developing voxels, i.e. components with a mesh structure that can be used to assemble objects with high strength and stiffness, such as aircraft wings, wind turbine blades and space structures.

“Here we take aviation principles and apply them to buildings. Why don’t we build buildings as efficiently as we make airplanes?” Gershenfeld says it builds on his lab’s previous work on voxel assembly with NASA, Airbus and Boeing.

To investigate the feasibility of a voxel-based building assembly strategy, researchers first evaluated the mechanical performance and durability of eight existing voxel designs, including a cuboid made of glass-reinforced nylon and a Kelvin grid made of steel.

Based on these evaluations, they developed a set of three voxels using fresh geometry that can be more easily assembled automatically into a larger structure. The fresh structure, based on a high-strength and high-stiffness octet mesh, mechanically self-adjusts to inflexible structures.

“The interlocked nature of these voxels means we can achieve good mechanical properties without having to use multiple joints in the system, so the build process can be much faster,” Smith says.

To speed up construction, they designed robotic assembly system based on robots resembling inchworms crawl through the voxel structure anchoring and stretching their bodies. These modular Inchworm Lattice Assembler robots, or MILAbots, operate grippers at each end to place voxel building blocks and enable snap-in connections.

“Robots can assemble voxels by dropping them into place and then stepping on them to make the pieces engage. We can perform precise maneuvers based on the mechanical connections between the robots and the voxels,” explains Smith.

The team examined the inherent carbon needed to create fresh voxel designs using three materials: plastic, plywood and steel. They then assessed the throughput and cost of using a robotic assembly system to construct a plain, single-story building. The researchers compared these estimates with the performance of other construction methods.

Potential environmental benefits

They found that most existing voxels, especially those made of plastic, performed poorly compared to existing methods in terms of sustainability, while the steel and wood voxels they designed offered significant environmental benefits.

For example, using their steel voxels would only generate 36 percent of the embodied carbon required for 3D concrete printing and 52 percent of the embodied carbon in precast concrete. Plywood voxels had the lowest carbon footprint, requiring approximately 17 percent and 24 percent of the embodied carbon needed, respectively.

“There is still a potential viable option for the plastic-based voxel approach, we just need to be a little more strategic in the types of plastics, infills and geometries we use,” Smith says.

Additionally, the expected on-site assembly time for the steel and wood voxels averaged 99 hours, while existing construction methods took an average of 155 hours.

These speed benefits are based on the distributed nature of voxel-based assembly. While one MILAbot working alone is significantly slower than existing techniques, with a team of 20 robots working in parallel, the system equals or exceeds existing automation methods at a lower cost.

“One of the advantages of this method is its gradual nature. You can start building, and if it turns out you need a new room, you can simply add to the structure. The method is also reversible, so if you change how it is used, you can dismantle the voxels and change the structure,” says Gershenfeld.

The researchers also developed an interface that allows users to enter or manually design the voxelized structure. The automated system determines the paths MILAbots should follow during construction and sends commands to the assemblers.

The next step for this project will be a larger testbed in Bhutan that will operate the “superfabricated lab” that CBA helped set up there to replicate robots to test the design of the planned sustainable city, Gershenfeld says.

Additional areas for future work include investigating the stability of voxel structures under lateral loads, refining the design tool to account for system physics, improving MILAbot robots, and evaluating voxels with integrated electrical and hydraulic covering, insulation, or routing.

“Our work helps explain why this type of distributed robot assembly could be a practical way to bring digital manufacturing to construction,” Smith says.

This work was funded in part by the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms consortium.

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A nationwide housing shortage is straining finances and communities across the United States. in Massachusetts, at least 222,000 houses will need to be built within the next 10 years to meet the needs of the population. At the same time, customary construction involves many challenges. There is a shortage of qualified construction workers. Most projects involve multiple contractors and subcontractors, which increases complexity and delays. The construction process, as well as the buildings themselves, can be a major source of emissions contributing to climate change.

Reframe Systems, co-founded by Vikas Enti SM ’20, uses robotics, software and high-performance materials to solve these problems. Founded in 2022, the company is implementing micro-factories that bring home manufacturing and production closer to the regions where homes are needed. The first homes designed and manufactured at Reframe’s first microfactory were entirely built in Arlington and Somerville, Massachusetts.

Enti’s experience in MIT systems design and management (SDM) has shaped the company since its inception. “Learning how to navigate the system and find optimal value for each stakeholder was a key part of business strategy,” he says, “and it is rooted in what I learned in SDM.”

Better troubleshooting tools at the system level

Enti applied for a master’s degree in engineering and management at SDM while he was working at Kiva Systems, overseeing its acquisition by Amazon and its transformation into Amazon Robotics. He discovered that the SDM program basics of systems engineering, system architecture and project management gave him the tools he needed to solve system-level problems in his work.

While at MIT, Enti also served as co-director of the $100,000 Entrepreneurship Competition. MIT dollars, which provides students and researchers with mentoring, feedback and potential funding for their startup ideas. He realized that “there is no single formula for starting a business or how long it takes to set it up,” he says, which helped shape his plans to start his own company.

Enti took a leave of absence from MIT to oversee the expansion of Amazon Robotics in Europe. He returned and graduated in 2020 with a thesis on developing technology that could mitigate the effects of falls in older people. The instinct to employ his education for good returned when his daughters were born. He wanted his future business to solve real problems and have a social impact, while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Growing housing construction, decreasing emissions

Enti concluded that housing, with its direct impact on the real world and a significant contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions, was the right problem to work on. He contacted his colleagues Aaron Diminutive and Felipe Polido of Amazon Robotics to share his idea for advanced, low-cost factories that could be deployed quickly and close to where they are needed. They both joined him as co-founders.

Currently, a microfactory in Andover, Massachusetts, produces structural panels, with robots framing the walls and ceilings and humans doing the rest, including wiring and plumbing. Ultimately, Reframe hopes to further automate the construction process through further employ of robotics. The modular construction process allows for less waste and disruption on the final construction site. The finished homes are designed to be energy productive and ready to install solar panels. The company is expected to begin work soon on a group of homes in Devens, Massachusetts.

In addition to its Andover location, Reframe is operating in Southern California to assist rebuild homes destroyed during the January 2025 wildfires in that region. The company’s software-assisted design process and microfactory customization capabilities enable it to meet local zoning and building codes and adapt to local architectural aesthetics. This means that in Somerville, completed Reframe buildings look like retrofitted versions of adjacent three-story buildings, known locally as “triplexes.” On the other side of the country, Reframe’s design portfolio includes Spanish-style and Craftsman homes.

“Housing is a complex systemic problem,” says Enti, explaining the impact SDM has had on his work at Reframe. The methods and tools taught in the integrated core class EM.412 (Fundamentals of Systems Design and Management) assist him address systems-level problems and address the needs of multiple stakeholders. The Reframe team used a technology roadmap to develop its overall business plan, inspired by the work of Olivier de Weck, associate chair of MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Lectures on project management given by Bryan Moser, academic director of SDM, are still relevant.

“Accepting the fact that this is a systemic problem and learning how to navigate the system and stakeholders to ensure we find optimal value has been a key part of the business strategy,” says Enti.

Reframe Systems intends to continue learning through iteration as it plans to expand its network of microfactories. The company remains committed to its core vision of sustainably meeting the country’s need for more housing. “I’m grateful we can do this,” Enti says. “When you remove all the robotics, advanced algorithms and factories, you end up with healthy, high-quality homes where families can live and grow.”

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You’ve probably used satellite today. Satellites allow us to stream our favorite shows, call and text friends, check weather and navigation apps, and make online purchases. Satellites also monitor the Earth’s climate, the extent of agricultural crops, wildlife habitats and the effects of natural disasters.

As we found more uses for them, the number of satellites increased. There are currently over 10,000 satellites in low Earth orbit. Another 5,000 decommissioned satellites drift through the region, along with more than 100 million pieces of debris, from spent rocket stages to flecks of spacecraft paint.

For MIT’s Richard Linares, the rapid ballooning of satellites raises pressing questions: How can we safely manage traffic and growing congestion in space? And at what point will we reach orbital capacity if adding more satellites is not sustainable and may actually endanger the spacecraft and services we rely on?

“It’s up to society to evaluate what value we get from launching more satellites,” says Linares, who recently received an associate professorship in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro). “One of the things we’re trying to do is approach traffic management and orbital capacity as engineering problems.”

Linares directs MIT’s Astrodynamics, Space Robotics, and Control Laboratory (ARCLab), a research group that uses astrodynamics (the motion and trajectory of objects in orbit) to track and manage millions of objects in Earth orbit. The group is also developing tools to predict changes in space traffic and debris as operators launch huge satellite “mega constellations” into space.

He also studies the impact of space weather on satellites, as well as how climate change on Earth may limit the number of satellites that can safely orbit in space. Anticipating that satellites will need to be smarter and faster to navigate cluttered environments, Linares is researching artificial intelligence to lend a hand satellites learn and reason autonomously to adapt to changing conditions and solve problems on board.

“Our research is quite diverse,” Linares says. “But overall, we want to make available all the economic opportunities that satellites provide us. And we are looking for engineering solutions to make this possible.”

Grounding practical problems

Linares was born and raised in Yonkers, Modern York. Both of his parents worked as school bus drivers to support their children, and Linares was the youngest of six children. He was an vigorous child and loved sports, playing football throughout high school.

“Sport allowed me to stay focused and organized, as well as develop a work ethic,” says Linares. “It taught me how to work hard.”

“My interest in science came from the universe and trying to understand our place in it,” Linares recalls.

Deciding to stay close to home, he applied to in-state schools with forceful aerospace engineering departments and luckily landed at the State University of Modern York at Buffalo (SUNY Buffalo), where he eventually earned bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degrees, all in aerospace engineering.

As a student, Linares undertook a research project in astrodynamics, aiming to solve the problem of determining the relative orientation of satellites flying in formation.

“Formation flying was a big topic in the early 2000s,” Linares says. “I liked the math aspect that allowed me to go one layer deeper towards the solution.”

He developed calculations to show that when three satellites fly together, they essentially form a triangle whose angles can be calculated to determine where each satellite is in relation to the other two at any given time. His work introduced a novel control approach to enable satellites to fly safely together. The research had direct applications to the United States Air Force, which helped fund the work.

While expanding his thesis research, Linares also took the opportunity to work directly with the Air Force on satellite tracking and orientation issues. He completed two internships at the United States Air Force Research Laboratory, one at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, Modern Mexico, and the other in Maui, Hawaii.

“Being able to work with the Air Force at that time kind of grounded the research in practical problems,” Linares says.

As part of his PhD, he tackled another practical problem of “uncorrelated tracks”. At the time, the Air Force was using a network of telescopes to observe more than 20,000 objects in space, and labeling and cataloging them helped track the objects over time. While object detection was relatively uncomplicated, the challenge was to associate the detected object with what was already in the catalog. In other words, was what they saw something they had already seen?

Linares developed image analysis techniques to identify key features of objects, such as their shape and orientation, which helped the Air Force “fingerprint” satellites and pieces of space debris and track their activity – and collision potential – over time.

After receiving his Ph.D., Linares worked as a postdoc at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the U.S. Naval Observatory. During this time, he expanded his aviation activities into other areas, including space weather, using satellite measurements to model the effects of Earth’s ionosphere – the upper layer of the atmosphere ionized by solar radiation – on satellite drag.

He then accepted a position as assistant professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Over the next three years, he continued research into space weather modeling, tracking space objects, and coordinating satellites to fly in swarms.

Making space

In 2018, Linares moved to MIT.

“I had a lot of respect for the people and the history of the work that had been done here,” says Linares, who was particularly inspired by the legendary Charles Stark “Doc” Draper, who in the 1940s developed the first inertial guidance systems that enabled airplanes, submarines, satellites and spacecraft to navigate independently for decades to come. “This was essentially my field, and I knew MIT was the best place to pursue my career.”

As a junior member of the AeroAstro faculty, Linares spent his early years focusing on an emerging challenge: space sustainability. Around this time, the first satellite constellations launched into low Earth orbit using SpaceX’s Starlink, which aimed to provide global Internet coverage through a massive network of several thousand coordination satellites. Launching so many satellites into orbits that already housed other vigorous and inactive satellites, along with millions of pieces of space debris, raised questions about how to safely manage satellite traffic and how much traffic an orbit can withstand.

“At what level do we reach the tipping point when we have too many satellites in certain orbital regimes?” – says Linares. “It was a fairly well-known problem at the time, but there weren’t many solutions.”

Linares’ group used knowledge of astrodynamics and the physics of how objects move in space to find the best way to pack satellites into orbital “shells,” or paths, that would most likely prevent collisions. They also developed a state-of-the-art orbital motion model that was able to simulate the trajectories of over 10 million individual objects in space. Previous models were much more circumscribed in the number of objects they could accurately simulate. Linares’ open source model, the so-called MIT Orbital Capacity Assessment Toolor MoCAT, could account for millions of pieces of space debris, as well as many intact satellites in orbit.

The tools his group developed are today used by satellite operators to plan and predict unthreatening spacecraft trajectories. His team continues to work on issues of space traffic management and orbital capacity. They also deal with space robotics. The team is testing ways to remotely control a humanoid robot, which could potentially lend a hand build future infrastructure and perform long-duration tasks in space.

Linares is also researching artificial intelligence, including ways a satellite can autonomously “learn” from its experience and safely adapt to uncertain conditions.

“Imagine if each satellite had a virtual Doc Draper on board that could do the error corrections that we did from the ground during the Apollo missions,” says Linares. “This would make satellites instantly more robust. And it doesn’t take humans out of the equation. It allows for human augmentation. I think that’s within reach.”

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Consider the main difference between living systems and electronics: the former is generally tender and spongy, while the latter is tough and stiff. Now, in work that could have implications for human-machine interfaces, biocompatible devices, tender robotics and more, MIT engineers and collaborators have developed a tender, adaptable gel that dramatically changes its conductivity when exposed to airy.

Enter the emerging field of ionotronics, which involves transmitting data through ions, or charged particles. Electronics does the same thing, with electrons. But while the latter method is now well established, ionotronics is still being developed, with one huge exception: living systems. Cells in our body communicate with a variety of ions, from potassium to sodium.

Ionotronics, in turn, can provide a bridge between electronics and biological tissues. Potential applications range from tender wearable technologies to human-machine interfaces

“We have discovered a mechanism for the dynamic control of the local population of ions in a soft material,” says Thomas J. Wallin, the John F. Elliott Career Development Professor in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering and principal investigator of the work. “This could allow for the creation of a system that will self-adapt to environmental stimuli, in this case light.” In other words, the system could automatically change in response to changes in lighting, which could enable complicated signal processing in tender materials.

An open-access article about this work has been published online recently in .

Growing field

Although others have developed high-conductivity ionotronic materials that enable rapid movement of ions, this conductivity cannot be controlled. “What we’re doing is using light to change a soft material from being insulating to one that’s 400 times more conductive,” says Xu Liu, first author of the paper and a former postdoctoral fellow at MIT in materials science and engineering and now an assistant professor at King’s College London.

Key to the work is a class of materials called photoion generators (PIGs). When exposed to airy, they can become about 1,000 times more conductive. The MIT team optimized how to incorporate PIG into polyurethane rubber by first dissolving the PIG powder in a solvent and then using a swelling method to incorporate it into the rubber.

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The electricity goes out on the island. To find a break in an underwater power cable, a ship pulls in the entire line or sends remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to traverse it. But what if an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) could draw a line and pinpoint the location of a fault that a diver could repair?

This underwater connection of humans and robots is the focus of an MIT Lincoln Laboratory project funded by the internally managed Autonomous Systems Research and Development Portfolio and implemented by Advanced Subsea Systems and Technologies Group. The project aims to leverage the strengths of humans and robots to optimize maritime missions for the U.S. military, including critical infrastructure inspection and repair, search and rescue, port entry and mine countermeasures operations.

“Divers and AUVs generally do not cooperate underwater,” says principal investigator Madeline Miller. “Underwater missions that require humans tend to do them because they involve manipulation that a robot cannot perform, such as repairing infrastructure or deactivating a mine. Even ROVs present a challenge when performing very demanding manipulation tasks underwater because the manipulators themselves are not agile enough.”

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