Metasurfaces consisting of an array planar sub-wavelength structures have shown great potentials in controlling thermal infrared radiation, including intensity, coherence, and polarization. These capabilities together with the two-dimensional nature make metasurfaces ultracompact multifunctional platform for light manipulation. Integrating functionalities, such as amplitude, phase (spectrum dir...

Tethered mobile robots are ideal for electrically noisy environments and for time-consuming tasks that require robust data communication and uninterrupted power delivery. However, tethers may become entangled in cluttered environments, leading to immobilization and consequent mission failure. This work addresses real-time monitoring of tethers to detect tether entanglement, perform disentanglem...

There is increasing realization that some tasks can be performed significantly better by humans than robots but, due to associated hazards, distance, etc., only a robot can be employed. Telemedicine is one area where remotely controlled robots can have a major impact by providing urgent care at remote sites. In recent years, remotely controlled robotics has been greatly advanced and the NASA Jo...

Due to developments driven mostly by the demands of the mobile communication industry and preparatory work by model aircraft flyers, it is possible to construct different sorts of electrically powered flying robots that can carry an interesting amount of payload in sensors and computers. We are interested in realising autonomous navigation capabilities on real flying robots which should suffice...

Bridging the gap between the skill sets of legged robotic systems and that of real animals is one of the major challenges in the field of robotics. Our long-term goal is to develop and control quadrupedal robots that are able to operate semiautonomously, i.e. they are only guided by users through highlevel velocity commands, such as move forward at 1 m/s, or turn with 0.5 rad/s. To achieve this...

Experiments have shown that DNA molecules in capillary electrophoresis migrate across field lines if a pressure gradient is applied simultaneously. We suggest that this migration results from an electrically driven flow field around the polyelectrolyte, which generates additional contributions to the center-of-mass velocity if the overall polymer conformation is asymmetric. This hypothesis lead...

Cation exchange (CE) has been recognized as a particularly powerful tool for the synthesis of heterogeneous nanocrystals. At present, CE can be divided into two categories, namely ion solvation-driven CE reaction and thermally activated CE reaction. Here we report an electrically driven CE reaction to prepare individual nanostructures inside a transmission electron microscope. During the proces...