route

Carlo Ratti, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Think of your morning walk to work, school or your favorite coffee shop. Are you taking the shortest possible route to your destination? According to big data research that my colleagues and I conducted, the answer is no: People’s brains are not wired for optimal navigation. Instead of calculating the shortest path, people try to point straight toward their destinations – we call it the “pointiest path” – even if it is not the most efficient way to walk. As a researcher who studies urban environments and human behavior, I have always been interested in how people experience cities, and how studying this can tell researchers something about human nature and how we’ve evolved. Chasing down a hunch Long before I could run an experime...

Building robotic grippers that can firmly grasp heavy objects and also gently grasp delicate ones usually requires complicated sets of gears, hinges and motors. But it turns out that it’s also possible to make grippers out of simple sheets of flexible material with the right creases in them. Our lab at Arizona State University has designed curved fold patterns that can change stiffness and flexibility. Flexible materials shaped with these patterns can be used to make simple, inexpensive robotic grippers, swimming robots and other mechanical devices. People naturally vary the amount of stiffness needed to handle fragile and sturdy objects appropriately. Robots interact with the environment in the same way. Curved folding is a simple way to give robots the ability to vary the amount of sti...

Tag: route

Even When It’s Not The Most Efficient Route – Cellphone Data Shows That People Navigate By Keeping Their Destinations In Front Of Them

A Creative Route To Making Robots And Other Mechanical Devices – Curved Origami