Devices & inventions

Building green performance motorcycles

04/17/12 — Electric motorcycles are quiet, and from a power perspective more efficient. Both traits are not lost on the rider. “If you get on these electric motorcycles the first thing you notice is a magic carpet ride feel,” says Abe Askenazi, B.S'92, M.S'94 ME. “It's almost like flying. It feels like you are on a glider and this thing is propelling you forward. You don't hear all of the drama of power production, you are just doing it.” Askenazi has traveled a long road to become the chief technology officer at Zero Motorcycles, one of the nation's leading electric motorcycle manufacturers.

Smart sensors in the woods

03/19/12 — About 60 percent of the water used in California comes from Sierra Nevada snowmelt. Monthly measurements help water managers estimate the amount of water held in the snowpack and allow them to allocate the state's most precious resource. Now, the Sierra Nevada is going high tech. Wireless sensors developed by Steven Glaser, professor of civil and environmental engineering, are being tested in an ambitious pilot project at the UC Merced Sierra Nevada Research Institute.

Replacing the Osterizer as standard lab equipment

03/19/12 — After a year in Asia and South America visiting research labs that lacked the basics, Lina Nilsson - a post-doctoral researcher in the bioengineering lab of professor Daniel Fletcher - and a team of engineering colleagues brainstormed about how to develop low-cost, accessible tools that could produce research-grade results. The team evolved into Tekla Labs, a cooperative of ten partners from Berkeley Engineering and UCSF. Their idea won first place for social entrepreneurship in the 2010-11 Big Ideas @ Berkeley contest.

Maker of resonators

03/19/12 — Most days (and nights), you'll find Ernest Ting-Ta Yen, a mechanical engineering Ph.D. student, immersed in the complexities of his microelectromechanical systems research. The aluminum nitride resonators he builds, aimed at new cell phones and communications applications, are designed to help shrink mobile devices while increasing functionality. Happen upon him in his graduate student office at midnight, though, and you'll hear lovely strains of music. Yen practices from midnight to 2 a.m., the only hours available to this busy researcher.

Berkeley Engineering grad students design an ‘EcoFridge’ that uses 40 per cent less energy

02/10/12 BusinessGreen — Imagine an environmentally friendly household refrigerator that is affordable and helps break people's energy-wasting habits when they use the appliance. That is what team of UC Berkeley grad students in engineering and industrial design students from the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico envisioned when they were asked by appliance manufacturer Mabe to develop a cost competitive fridge that is kinder to the environment than others available to consumers in Mexico.

A Cal ‘Kinect-ion’

11/29/11 — In the fall of 2008, Jack Kang (B.S'04 EECS) was settling into a new marketing position at Marvell, a Santa Clara-based semiconductor company, when Microsoft came knocking with a mysterious assignment for the company. Working on an undisclosed product, the computing giant needed a team to design a complex chip for manufacture on a massive scale. “This project was very secretive,” recalls Kang. Many months into the development of a specialized microprocessor, he got his answer. The mystery chip was destined for Kinect, Microsoft's controller-free and immensely popular electronic game sensor device.

Not your grandmother’s microscope

11/08/11 California Academy of Sciences — CellScope, a project initiated by UC Berkeley bioengineering professor Dan Fletcher and his students, has opened up the microscopic world to more people. The lightweight, mobile microscopes are not only being used in developing countries to diagnose disease, but also in classrooms to get kids excited about science.

An intelligent approach to mobile news

09/12/11 — Do you read news on your cell phone? According to a 2010 Pew Research Center study, 33 percent of cell phone owners now check news, weather and sports headlines on their mobile phones. Yet searching for and reading news on a 3.5-inch screen isn't easy. Earlier this year, EECS Ph.D. students Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick and Mohit Bansal teamed up on a project that may alleviate the problem.

Tracking the mighty microbe

08/18/11 — Jillian Banfield studies very, very small things, but her work is vast in its scope and impact. So vast, in fact, that her discoveries have implications for space, the human body and nearly everything in between. Banfield, a biogeochemist, geomicrobiologist and professor of materials science and engineering, studies microbes-their function and potential both individually and in groups. “Microorganisms are essentially everywhere,” says Banfield, “and they carry out all the really essential transformations that drive earth's biogeochemical cycles.”

To catch a speeding bullet

08/18/11 — In 1992, East Palo Alto, a city of 24,000 on the San Francisco Peninsula, logged the highest homicide rate in the nation per capita. The sounds of gunfire worried Robert Showen (B.S'65 EECS), who worked at SRI International in Menlo Park, just two miles from East Palo Alto's border. Showen specialized in acoustics and radio wave propagation, and it occurred to him: What if technology could locate the gunfire and tell police where it's coming from? Today, Showen's ShotSpotter systems are located in more than 70 sites across the nation and around the world. Think of a ShotSpotter system as an electronic citizen calling 9-1-1.

Exoskeleton lets UC Berkeley grad take a huge step

05/15/11 San Francisco Chronicle — When Austin Whitney, a paralyzed 22-year-old UC Berkeley student, rose from his wheelchair and stepped across the commencement stage on Saturday to shake Chancellor Robert Birgeneau's hand, the crowd of 15,000 at Edwards Stadium went wild with cheers, as if witnessing a miracle. A team of UC Berkeley mechanical engineers - four doctoral students led by Professor Homayoon Kazerooni - have been developing a computerized body brace called an exoskeleton they believe will be good enough to transform thousands of wheelchair users into walking people in a couple of years, and for an affordable price.

Moving data at the speed of light

05/04/11 — Modern computing has a looming data traffic problem. Sometime in the next decade, experts say, processors will not be able to deliver better performance, because integrated circuits will have reached their capacity. Commonly described as interconnect bottleneck, this phenomenon means that computers, regardless of their processing speed, will be incapable of moving data any faster. But Berkeley engineers, led by Connie Chang-Hasnain, have recently developed a groundbreaking process that could solve the vexing problem of interconnect bottleneck and lead to a new class of faster, more efficient microprocessors.

Sun-driven and Australia-bound

05/04/11 — To build a car powered completely by the sun, a team of Berkeley students is burning lots of midnight oil. A year-and-a-half in the making, a sleek vehicle called Impulse was unveiled at Cal Day and is on track to compete in the world's premier solar car race this October. Behind the effort is the 73-member crew of CalSol, the campus's student-run solar vehicle team. This fall, 15 to 20 students will withdraw from school for the semester to participate in CalSol's first-ever entry in the World Solar Challenge, an 1,800-mile road race across Australia.

A 411 on water’s next drop

02/02/11 — In the south India city of Hubli, turning on the tap is no easy task. Residents frequently skip work, postpone errands or keep children home from school in anticipation of the precious-but notoriously unreliable-arrival of water along urban pipelines. Missing a delivery can translate into days without household water. “Literally, people wait around their house until the water comes on,” says Anu Sridharan (B.S'09, M.S'10 CEE). Sridharan is part of a Berkeley-based student team pursuing a novel-but surprisingly simple-fix to what is a common occurrence in the developing world. Their project, called NextDrop, deploys ubiquitous mobile phones to alert residents when water is flowing in a neighborhood.

Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect beyond hackers, hobbyists

01/10/11 San Francisco Chronicle — Microsoft's Kinect, a motion-tracking peripheral for the Xbox console that is packed with an irresistible blend of cameras and sensors, is finding popularity among researchers such as UC Berkeley engineering graduate student Patrick Bouffard. Working out of Professor Claire Tomlin's lab, Bouffard built a Kinect-enhanced robotic helicopter that perceives objects in its path. A video of the device has been a viral hit on YouTube.

Bionic legs allow paraplegics to get up and walk

10/11/10 TIME Magazine — A robotic exoskeleton called eLEGS enables people who have been paralyzed below the waist to walk again. The technology, the latest in a line of "human augmentation robotics systems" that Berkeley Bionics has created with the Robotics and Human Engineering Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, is geared toward consumers -- the 6 million or so paraplegics in the U.S. who are bound to wheelchairs.

She paints for power

10/05/10 — What will power our next-generation gizmos? The microdevices, nanodevices and picodevices of the future? Our prediction: the Christine Ho battery. As an MSE graduate student, Ho (B.S.'05, M.S.'07, Ph.D.'10 MSE) developed a novel microbattery technology that promises to not only power the smallest of smart devices but also accelerate a variety of energy applications, from better home energy monitoring systems to large-scale energy storage solutions for wind and solar farms.

UK animators use CellScope to film smallest stop-motion animation ever

09/20/10 Popular Science — Using a Nokia N8 smartphone and a CellScope -- developed by Berkeley Engineering's Daniel Fletcher and winner of a PopSci Best of What's New award in 2008 -- the team behind the Wallace & Gromit series has made the world's smallest stop-motion animation film. Nokia commissioned the film in celebration of CellScope's potential to improve medicine in the developing world. The film features a 0.35-inch-tall Dot as she runs through an obstacle course made of British currency and rides a bumblebee.

Video feature: Rube Goldberg returns and wackiness ensues

09/08/10 — What's the best device for dispensing a dollop of hand sanitizer? At Berkeley, it's one that also prompts the famous Bellagio fountain to erupt, Evel Knievel to crash his motorcycle and a house of cards to spring up before your eyes. The magic and mayhem were part of a winning, Las Vegas-themed contraption built by a team of engineering students for Berkeley's first-ever Rube Goldberg Machine Contest in April. The competition challenged Cal student teams to build a six-foot by six-foot machine in the spirit of popular cartoonist Rube Goldberg, a 1904 Berkeley Engineering graduate who died in 1970 and is best known for his comic drawings of outrageously complicated machines performing simple tasks.

Laser backpack creates instant 3D models

08/08/10 ABC News — Researchers at UC Berkeley have developed a laser backpack that scans its surroundings and creates an instant 3D model. The modeling tool, built by a team led by electrical engineering professor Avideh Zakhor, can make video games more realistic and buildings more energy efficient.