Devices & inventions

Robotic surgical arm picking up grains of rice from a moving platform

How flight simulation tech can help turn robots into surgeons

03/02/18 Wired — Robotics researchers from Berkeley's AUTOLab, led by IEOR and EECS professor Ken Goldberg, have built a heaving robotic platform - mimicking the motion of a breathing, heart-beating human patient - to help develop algorithms that robotic surgical assistants can use to guide their cutting.

Cheap, efficient cookstoves are small-tech solution with big payoff

02/13/18 — Ashok Gadgil, professor of civil and environmental engineering, redesigned a simple technology - the wood cookstove - to help women in refugee camps in Darfur, Sudan. The inexpensive and efficient Darfur stove not only reduced the danger of gathering firewood in the war-torn region, it also reduced health and climate risks from excessive smoke.

Reducing air pollution with smart design

02/13/18 CITRIS — Air pollution is a global epidemic that kills more than 3.2 million people prematurely each year. Clarity, an environmental tech startup out of the CITRIS Foundry, produces smart air-quality monitoring systems designed to reduce this number.

Computer vision to protect patients — and budgets

02/09/18 Berkeley Research — EECS professor Alexandre Bayen and Ph.D. student Pulkit Agrawal have developed a computer vision-based system to help memory care centers monitor falls by dementia patients and to reduce them where possible.

Nikita Bier (right) being interviewed by Jeremy Fiance of the House Fund

How to build a viral app

02/06/18 Sutardja Center — Telling a Newton Lecture Series audience that he got "really good at failing," Berkeley alumnus Nikita Bier recounted his difficult journey to creating TBH, a viral app that allows teenagers to anonymously compliment each other through a series of polls.

Why traffic apps make congestion worse

01/30/18 — Has your smartphone traffic app ever led you into a traffic jam? Professor and traffic engineer Alexandre Bayen, director of UC Berkeley's Institute of Transportation Studies, is working on smarter apps that will actually talk to one another to prevent clogged freeways and city streets.

A student uses wires, soap and a handheld device to explore bending effects

Exploring digital fabrication at Jacobs Hall

01/29/18 Jacobs Institute — A reconfigurable lampshade, a novel musical instrument, an affordable tool for surgery planning: these are among the student projects that used resources in Jacobs Hall to explore digital fabrication technology during the fall 2017 semester.

Warren Hoburg with the Jungle Hawk Owl drone

Drone pioneer Warren Hoburg named Innovator of the Year

12/20/17 R&D — Aerospace engineer and astronaut candidate Warren "Woody" Hoburg (M.S.'11, Ph.D.'13 EECS) has been named Innovator of the Year by R&D Magazine for his pioneering work creating the Jungle Hawk Owl extended-flight drone.

A new metacanvas for metamaterials

12/13/17 — Junqiao Wu and Jie Yao, professors of materials science and members of Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division, asked themselves how it might be possible to create metamaterial devices that could be erased and written over again - like an Etch A Sketch drawing toy - to quickly yield a quite different device.