rough sketch

Our 14-inch-long robotic elephant trunk has five segments, each made of a silicone membrane with an embedded metal spring that acts like an exoskeleton. The segments are filled with dry coffee grounds and each is vacuum-controlled separately. When coffee grounds are loosely packed, they’re in a liquid-like state. When they’re vacuum-packed, they transition into a solid-like state.

"Our Aware-2 camera combines 98 small cameras with a spherical lens to take black-and-white gigapixel photographs. It set the record for the largest digital snapshot by a terrestrial camera. One image from the camera, printed at 300 dots per inch, is 8 feet high by 16 feet long.

For years, people have tried to come up with ways to steer bullets, and everyone has consistently said you can’t do it. And you couldn’t—if the bullet was spinning. A spinning bullet is too stable; you can’t apply enough force to turn it off its axis of revolution. The secret sauce is that our bullet doesn’t spin. It’s kind of like a musket ball, which doesn’t rotate, but with technology added to let us control where it goes.

If you want a robot to maneuver aggressively, it has to be small. As you scale things down, the “moment of inertia”—the resistance to angular motion—drops dramatically. Our nano-quadrotor robots are made to be as lightweight as possible: less than a fifth of a pound and palm-sized.

How do you get a core sample from a comet? There’s so little gravity that if you used a scoop or a drill, you’d push yourself right off the surface. To solve this problem, we came up with a harpoon that collects samples. The concept is that the spacecraft flies next to the moving comet and fires from about 30 feet away, we would use a dampening system and propulsion to counteract the recoil. Our prototype harpoon is stainless steel, about one foot long, two inches wide and four pounds.

"We made a lens that displays a single pixel that can be turned on and off wirelessly. An integrated circuit stores the energy, and a light-emitting diode shoots light toward the eye, but the optics are tricky. You can’t focus on something that’s that close. To correct this, we put a series of tiny lenses between the LED and the eye—imagine holding your finger too close to your eye so it’s blurry; you could bring it into focus by putting a magnifying glass between your eye and your finger.

Our inspiration came from a classmate who has spina bifida—a split spine—and can’t ride a regular bike. Our trike has extra back support and a steering system to make turning easier. On a normal bike, leaning in the direction you want to go helps you turn. It’s hard to do that on a trike because it’s rigid, but ours has hydraulic pistons that tilt the tires when you lean, allowing you to make tighter corners. You can go just as fast as you could on a regular bike, and we’re going to add an electric motor, so it is going to be really fun to ride. We’re building a prototype in our shop at school.

Humans are not very efficient. When we walk, we waste close to 20 watts of energy per second. Instead of turning all calories into lift or forward motion, we turn most of them into heat that’s quickly dissipated. So my colleagues and I came up with a way to harvest the wasted energy from human motion and convert it into about 10 watts of electricity.

Ocean research, navigation, seafloor mapping, object-tracking (sonar, for example)—they all rely on sound, which is still the best way to transmit information through water. So we wanted to build the ultimate hydrophone, one that could listen to the quietest sounds and the loudest sounds and could work anywhere, even six miles underwater, where the atmospheric pressure is 1,000 times as much as it is up top. Whale ears were our inspiration.

I’m an instrument builder, mostly, and I work on positron-emission-tomography devices: PET. Doctors use them to look for cancer, but neuroscientists use them too. In studies with lab rats, they inject a mildly radioactive substance into the rat, and the PET scan measures the gamma rays the substance gives off. This tells researchers what part of the brain the substance is in and what parts are active.

We know of at least 70,000 species of fungi, but we don’t know how most of them get their spores airborne. That’s what we’re trying to find out. Fungi are spectacularly mobile, especially when they’re launching spores, and that is a tremendous biomechanical feat. For microscopic things, air represents a significant obstacle.