The field of mechatronics is multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary, occupying the intersection of mechanical systems, electronics, controls, and computer science. Mechatronics engineers work in a variety of industries ' from space exploration to semiconductor manufacturing to product design ' and specialize in the integrated design and development of intelligent systems. For students wanting to learn mechatronics, it might come as a surprise that one of the most powerful teaching tools available for the subject matter is simply a pen and a piece of paper. 'Students have to be able to work out things on a piece of paper, and make sketches, and write down key calculations in order to be creative,' says MIT professor of mechanical engineering David Trumper, who has been teaching class 2.737 (Mechatronics) since he joined the Institute faculty in the early 1990s. The subject is electrical and mechanical engineering combined, he says, but more than anything else, it's design. 'If you just do electronics, but have no idea how to make the mechanical parts work, you can't find really creative solutions. You have to see ways to solve problems across different domains,' says Trumper. 'MIT students tend to have seen lots of math and lots of theory. The hands-on part is really critical to build that skill set; with hands-on experiences they'll be more able to imagine how other things might work when they're designing them.'...

CAMBRIDGE — Imagine using the tiny light on a smartphone to draw shapes in the air that are captured in three dimensions by a computer program and can be rotated and viewed from any angle. As recently as Saturday, this program did not exist, but the hours-old technology took first prize Sunday at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s first HackMIT, a student-run competition that drew undergraduate and high school programmers from across North America and overseas. The developers of the program, called Lightboard, were Victor Hung, 20, and Vincent Siao, 21, high school friends from Vancouver, British Columbia. Hung and Siao said they set out to record flat drawings, but discovered that it was possible to view the images in three dimensions. Advertisement “We realized we could capture the depth of the light just based on the size” of the beam as it is recorded by the device, said Hung, a senior computer science major at MIT. “Victor has some really crazy-cool ideas sometimes, and this is one of them,” said Siao, a senior studying computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “I didn’t think it was possible, and he just went ahead and did it.”...

We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from. To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. Please also read our Privacy Notice and Terms of Use, which became effective December 20, 2019. By choosing I Accept, you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. On the latest Recode Decode, MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito says we need to resist the urge to oversimplify the problems we’re solving. Uncovering and explaining how our digital world is changing — and changing us. According to a witty saying usually attributed to Albert Einstein, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” And when engineers try to solve a problem, says MIT’s Joi Ito, they often veer over that line. “Tech people tend to want to just solve the problem,” Ito said on the latest episode of Recode Decode with Kara Swisher. “But the problem with the problem is it’s not like previous problems, where you just solve it. You actually have to keep asking the question, ‘Is this even the right question?’ And this is why it’s much more difficult.”...

Explosions caused by leaking gas pipes under city streets have frequently made headlines in recent years, including one that leveled an apartment building in New York this spring. But while the problem of old and failing pipes has garnered much attention, methods for addressing such failing infrastructure have lagged far behind. Typically, leaks are found using aboveground acoustic sensors, which listen for faint sounds and vibrations caused by leakage, or in-pipe detectors, which sometimes use video cameras to look for signs of pipe breaks. But all such systems are very slow, and can miss small leaks altogether. Now researchers at MIT and King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM) in Saudi Arabia have devised a robotic system that can detect leaks at a rapid pace and with high accuracy by sensing a large pressure change at leak locations. The concept was presented at two recent international conferences, and has been described in several recent papers. This new system “can detect leaks of just 1 to 2 millimeters in size, and at relatively low pressure,” says Dimitrios Chatzigeorgiou, a PhD student in mechanical engineering at MIT and lead author of the research papers. “We’ve proved that the concept works.”...