Process Engineering

Facelifts can sag. Botox is temporary. But modern science has a new way to return youth to weathered faces: the rock abrasion tool (RAT). If your dermatologist hasn’t heard of it, ask your local Mars scientist.

Billions of years of exposure to the sun, atmosphere and extremely fine Martian dust has given Mars rocks a weathered “rind,” or exterior layer. The RAT, part of the science-instrument package carried by the two Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, uses a diamond-tipped robotic

Hundreds of billions of plastic food and beverage containers are manufactured each year in the U.S. All of these packages must undergo sterilization, which at present is done using high temperatures or chemicals. Both of these methods have drawbacks. Chemicals often leave a residue that can affect the safety and taste of the product, and produce undesirable waste. Heat is effective and sufficiently rapid, but necessitates the use of costly heat-resistant plastics that can withstand sterilization temp

New technologies developed by University of Southern California engineers to measure the toxic properties of ultrafine particles in air pollution are helping scientists understand the connection between smog and cardio-respiratory disease.

“We are just beginning to realize that these microscopic specks of dust and soot are far more toxic in the human body than larger, coarser particles,” said Constantinos Sioutas, deputy director and co-principal investigator of USC’s Southern Californi

Australian scientists have developed a ’brain’, which enables the production of a world-first low-cost, intelligent small helicopter, set to end many difficult and dangerous tasks undertaken by humans.

The CSIRO Mantis can simply be told where to go and what to do, and it will go off, do the job and find its own way home, unassisted.

The low-cost CSIRO Mantis, described as a vertical take-off, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), provides a host of new ways of doing things.

Robot researchers have long looked at the science of Kinematics and particularly how it applies to parallel robotics as providing novel solutions to robotic problems. But now researchers at the University of Warwick and China’s Tianjin University have used kinematic theory to produce a hybrid “rapid pick and place” robot that draws useful traits from both parallel and series robots and costs a third less than similar robots on the market.

The Diamond 600 robot uses parallel motors to drive i

For the first time since 1960, US scientists will be able to explore the deepest parts of the world’s oceans, up to seven miles below the surface, with a novel underwater vehicle capable of performing multiple tasks in extreme conditions. Researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) are developing a battery-powered underwater robot to enable scientists to explore the ocean’s most remote regions up to 11,000 meters (36,000-feet) deep.

The hybrid remotely operated vehicle