Aurelia Butler

5G communications’ superfast download speeds rely on the high frequencies that drive the transmissions. But the highest frequencies come with a tradeoff.
Frequencies at the upper end of the 5G spectrum hold the greatest amount of data and could be critical to high-resolution augmented and virtual reality, video streaming, video conferencing, and services in crowded urban areas. But those high-end frequencies are easily blocked by walls, furniture and even people. This has been a hurdle to achieving the technology’s full potential.
Now, a team led by Princeton researchers has developed a new device to help higher-frequency 5G signals, known as millimeter-wave or mmWave, overcome this obstacle. The device, called mmWall, is about the size of a small tablet. It can steer mmWave signals to reach all corners of a large room, and, when installed in a window, can bring signals from an outdoor transmitter indoors. The researchers presented their work on mmWall at the USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation in Boston on April 19.
While computers and smartphones often connect to Wi-Fi indoors to get the best data speeds, outdoor 5G base stations could someday replace Wi-Fi systems and provide high-speed connectivity both indoors and outdoors, preventing glitches when devices switch between networks, said Kun Woo Cho, a Ph.D. student in Princeton’s Department of Computer Science and the lead author of the research. Boosting 5G signals with technology like mmWall will be crucial to this broader adoption, she said.
The mmWall is an accordion-like array of 76 vertical panels that can both reflect and refract radio waves at frequencies above 24 gigahertz, the lower bound of mmWave signals. These frequencies can provide a bandwidth five to 10 times greater than the maximum capability of 4G networks. The device can steer beams around obstacles, as well as efficiently align the beams of transmitter and receiver to establish connections quickly and maintain them seamlessly.
“Wireless transmissions at these higher frequencies resemble beams of light more than a broadcast in all directions, and so get blocked easily by humans and other obstacles,” said senior study author Kyle Jamieson, a professor of computer science who leads the Princeton Advanced Wireless Systems Lab (PAWS).
The mmWall surface is the first to be able to reflect such transmissions in such a way that the angle of reflection does not equal the angle of incidence, sidestepping a classic law of physics. The device can also “refract transmissions that hit one side of the surface through at a different angle of departure, and is fully electronically reconfigurable within microseconds, allowing it to keep up with the ‘line rate’ of tomorrow’s ultra-fast networks,” said Jamieson.
Each panel of mmWall holds two meandering lines of thin copper wire, flanking a line of 28 broken circles made of thicker wire, which constitute meta-atoms — materials whose geometry is designed to achieve tunable electrical and magnetic properties. Applying controlled electrical current to these meta-atoms can change the behavior of the mmWave signals that interact with the mmWall surface — dynamically steering the signals around obstacles by shifting their paths by up to 135 degrees.
“Just by changing the voltage, we can tune the phase,” or the relationship between the incoming and outgoing radio waves, said Cho. “We can basically steer to any angle for transmission and reflection. State-of-the-art surfaces generally only work for reflection or only work for transmission, but with this we can do both at any arbitrary angle with high amplitude.”
The process is analogous to light waves slowing down when they pass through a glass of water, said Cho. The water changes the direction of the light waves and makes objects appear distorted when viewed through the water.
Cho mathematically analyzed different parameters of the meta-atoms’ geometry to arrive at the optimal size, shape and arrangement for the copper meta-atoms and the pathways between them, which were fabricated with standard printed circuit board technology and mounted on a 3D-printed frame. In designing mmWall, the team aimed to use the smallest possible meta-atoms (each has a diameter of less than a millimeter), in order to optimize their interaction with mmWaves, as well as to simplify the device’s fabrication and minimize the amount of copper. The mmWall also uses only microwatts of electricity, about 1,000 times less than Wi-Fi routers which use an average of about 6 watts.
Cho tested mmWall’s ability to transmit and steer mmWave signals in a 900-square-foot lab in Princeton’s Computer Science building. With a transmitter in the room, mmWall improved the signal-to-noise ratio at nearly all of the 23 spots tested around the room. And when the transmitter was placed outdoors, mmWall again boosted signals all around the room, including in roughly 40% of spots that had been completely blocked without the use of mmWall. More

In the future, communications networks and computers will use information stored in objects governed by the microscopic laws of quantum mechanics. This capability can potentially underpin communication with greatly enhanced security and computers with unprecedented power. A vital component of these technologies will be memory devices capable of storing quantum information to be retrieved at will.
Virginia Lorenz, a professor of physics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, studies Lambda-type optical quantum memory devices, a promising technology that relies on light interacting with a large group of atoms. She is developing a device based on hot metallic vapor with graduate student Kai Shinbrough. As the researchers work towards a practical device, they are also providing some of the first theoretical analyses of Lambda-type devices. Most recently, they reported the first variance-based sensitivity analysis describing the effects of experimental noise and imperfections in Physical Review A.
“Prior to this paper, you would just have to assume that everything in the quantum memory behaves ideally,” Shinbrough said. “This is the first time that things like noise have been considered, and the results of our analyses inform experimental design.”
Lambda-type quantum memory uses a collection of atoms that interacts with two kinds of light: single photons containing quantum information that are absorbed, and powerful laser pulses controlling when the photons’ information is absorbed and released. There are several storage-and-retrieval protocols that rely on different mechanisms, and the best choice is determined by the properties of the atoms and the controlling laser pulses.
Past analyses of these protocols assumed ideal conditions. Effects like device noise and small errors in experimental settings were not discussed. Shinbrough and Lorenz needed to understand these effects to develop a robust quantum memory device, so they filled this gap in the literature. They analyzed the impact of both random device noise and slow overall drift in experimental parameters on a Lambda-type device’s memory efficiency, a measure of how often the device works as intended.
“The techniques we used are well established in classical physics and engineering, but we’re applying them to a quantum system for the first time,” Shinbrough said.
In addition to considering how noise and drift in experimental parameters individually impact device performance, the researchers used the technique of Sobol’ sensitivity analysis to study how the simultaneous variation of all parameters impacts the memory efficiency. This allowed them to identify the parameters that had the most significant impact for each protocol and determine how variations in different parameters combine.
Shinbrough explained that the central result of this analysis is understanding how different experimental parameters may be tuned to compensate for imperfections in different settings. He gave the example of variation in the arrival times of the control pulse and the single photon. Each memory mechanism relies on a carefully tuned delay in the arrival times. If this delay begins to drift, then the control pulse can be made to last longer in time so the overlap with the single photon is roughly the same and the impact on memory efficiency is mitigated.
The results of this analysis have informed Shinbrough and Lorenz’s experimental efforts. The researchers found that certain effects like variations in the hot metal vapor are often negligible while others like the characteristics of the controlling pulse can have a significant impact on experimental performance.
“Our analyses have allowed us to develop a better-informed experiment taking full advantage of our device’s properties,” Lorenz said. “Moreover, we have developed a framework that allows others to perform the same analyses for their experiments.” More

The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger for their works on “quantum nonlocality” in quantum mechanics. Quantum nonlocality is a phenomenon where connected particles can affect each other instantly, regardless of the distance separated.
Imagine you owned a pair of gloves. These gloves are a pair and therefore correlated in some way, no matter how far apart they are. One day, you place one of the gloves into your backpack and hop on a flight to travel to another country, while the other glove remains at home. According to quantum nonlocality, if you changed the color of the glove you brought with you, the color of the glove back home would instantaneously change too, despite being separated by a large distance.
Nonlocality violates many of the concepts predicted by classical physics, where particles’ properties are predetermined and change occurs only through direct physical interaction or fields propagated at a finite speed. Nonlocality has a wide array of implications for understanding the future of reality, quantum mechanics, and the development of quantum technologies.
There exist several ways to define and interpret nonlocality. For instance, a set of mathematical expressions called the Bell and CHSH inequalities demonstrates nonlocality by violating inequalities. Meanwhile, Lucien Hardy proposed an alternative interpretation of quantum nonlocality in 1992 when he developed the Hardy Paradox.
Suppose there are three quantities A, B, and C, where A is greater than B and B is greater than C. Intuitively, and according to a fundamental mathematical property known as the transitive property (or local hidden variable theories in physics), this would render A greater than C.
However, Hardy noted that there is still room for a situation where C is greater than A. This violates the transitive property, and such violations are possible in the quantum world when particles are entangled with each other. In other words, this is nonlocality.
We can use “rock-paper-scissors” to imagine this. While it is evident that rock beats scissors and scissors beat paper, it is impossible for the rock to beat paper. Paper beating rock does not align with any mathematical reasoning, hence why it is a paradox.
A recent study, published in the journal American Physical Review A, has made interesting revelations about the Hardy nonlocality. The study was co-authored by Dr. Le Bin Ho from Tohoku University’s Frontier Research Institute for Interdisciplinary Sciences (FRIS).
“The Hardy nonlocality has significant implications for understanding fundamental quantum mechanics, and it is vital for strengthening the probability of nonlocal,” said Le. “We used quantum computers and methods to investigate the measurement of Hardy nonlocality to improve its probability.”
Le and his colleagues did this by proposing a theoretical framework for attaining a higher nonlocal probability. They verified this by using a theoretical model and a quantum simulation.
Despite previous studies showing the opposite, they discovered that nonlocal probability increases as the number of particles grows. This suggests that quantum effects persist even at larger scales, further challenging classical theories of physics.
Le says these findings have important ramifications for understanding quantum mechanics and its potential applications in communications. “Understanding quantum nonlocality can lead to groundbreaking technological advancements, such as the secure transmission of information through quantum communication via nonlocality resources.” More

Quantum teleportation is a technique allowing the transfer of quantum information between two distant quantum objects, a sender and a receiver, using a phenomenon called quantum entanglement as a resource. The unique feature of this process is that the actual information is not transferred by sending quantum bits (qubits) through a communication channel connecting the two parties; instead, the information is destroyed at one location and appears at the other one without physically travelling between the two. This surprising property is enabled by quantum entanglement, accompanied by the transmission of classical bits.
There is a deep interest in quantum teleportation nowadays within the field of quantum communications and quantum networks because it would allow the transfer of quantum bits between network nodes over very long distances, using previously shared entanglement. This would help the integration of quantum technologies into current telecommunication networks and extend the ultra-secure communications enabled by these systems to very long distances. In addition, quantum teleportation permits the transfer of quantum information between different kinds of quantum systems, e.g. between light and matter or between different kinds of quantum nodes.
Quantum teleportation was theoretically proposed in the early 90s and experimental demonstrations were carried out by several groups around the world. While the scientific community has gained extensive experience on how to perform these experiments, there is still an open question on how to teleport information in a practical way, allowing reliable and fast quantum communication over an extended network. It seems clear that such an infrastructure should be compatible with the current telecommunications network. In addition, the protocol of quantum teleportation requires a final operation to be applied on the teleported qubit, conditioned on the result of the teleportation measurement (transmitted by classical bits), in order to transfer the information faithfully and at a higher rate, a feature called active feed-forward. This means that the receiver requires a device known as a quantum memory that can store the qubit without degrading it until the final operation can be implemented. Finally, this quantum memory should be able to operate in a multiplexed fashion to maximize the speed of teleporting information when the sender and the receiver are far away. To date, no implementation had incorporated these three requirements in the same demonstration.
In a recent study published in Nature Communications, ICFO researchers Dario Lago-Rivera, Jelena V. Rakonjac, Samuele Grandi, led by ICREA Prof. at ICFO Hugues de Riedmatten have reported achieving long distance teleportation of quantum information from a photon to a solid-state qubit, a photon stored in a multiplexed quantum memory. The technique involved the use of an active feed-forward scheme, which, together with the multimodality of the memory, has allowed maximization of the teleportation rate. The proposed architecture was compatible with the telecommunications channels, and thus enabling future integration and scalability for long-distance quantum communication.
How to achieve quantum teleportation
The team built two experimental setups, that in the jargon of the community are usually called Alice and Bob. The two setups were connected by a 1km optical fiber spun up in a spool, to emulate a physical distance between the parties.

Three photons were involved in the experiment. In the first setup, Alice, the team used a special crystal to create two entangled photons: the first photon at 606 nm, called signal photon, and the second photon called idler photon, compatible with the telecommunications infrastructure. Once created, “we kept the first 606 nm photon at Alice and stored it in a multiplexed solid-state quantum memory, holding it in the memory for future processing. At the same time, we took the telecom photon created at Alice and sent it through the 1km of optical fiber to reach the second experimental setup, called Bob,” Dario Lago recalls.
In this second setup, Bob, the scientists had another crystal where they created a third photon, where they had encoded the quantum bit they wanted to teleport. Once the third photon was created, the second photon had arrived to Bob from Alice, and this is where the core of the teleportation experiment takes place.
Teleporting information over 1km
The second and third photons interfered with each other through what is known as a Bell State measurement (BSM). The effect of this measurement was to mix the state of the second and third photon. Thanks to the fact that the first and second photons were entangled to begin with, i.e. their joint state was highly correlated, the result of the BSM was that of transferring the information encoded in the third photon to the first one, stored by Alice in the quantum memory, 1 km away. As Dario Lago and Jelena Rakonjac mention, “we are capable of transferring information between two photons that were never in contact before, but connected through a third photon that was indeed entangled with the first. The uniqueness of this experiment lies in the fact that we employed a multiplexed quantum memory capable of storing the first photon for long enough such that by the time Alice found out that the interaction had happened, we were still able to process the teleported information as the protocol requires.”
This processing that Dario and Jelena mention was the active feed-forward technique mentioned earlier. Depending on the outcome of the BSM, a phase-shift was applied to the first photon after storage in the memory. In this way, the same state would always be encoded in the first photon. Without this, half of the teleportation events would have to be discarded. Moreover, the multimodality of the quantum memory allowed them to increase the teleportation rate beyond the limits imposed by the 1 km separation between them without degrading the quality of the teleported qubit. Overall, this resulted in a teleportation rate three times higher than for a single-mode quantum memory, only limited by the speed of the classical hardware.
Scalability and Integration
The experiment carried out by this group in 2021, where they achieved for the first time entanglement of two multimode quantum memories separated by 10 meters and heralded by a photon at the telecommunication wavelength, has been the precursor of this experiment.
As Hugues de Riedmatten emphasizes, “Quantum teleportation will be crucial for enabling high-quality long-distance communication for the future quantum internet. Our goal is to implement quantum teleportation in more and more complex networks, with previously distributed entanglement. The solid-state and multiplexed nature of our quantum nodes as well as their compatibility with the telecom network make them a promising approach to deploy the technology over long distance in the installed fiber network.”
Further improvements are already being planned. On the one hand, the team is focused on developing and improving the technology in order to extend the setup to much longer distances while maintaining the efficiency and rates. On the other hand, they also aim at studying and using this technique in the transfer of information between different types of quantum nodes, for a future quantum Internet that will be able to distribute and process quantum information between remote parties. More

A team of UCR electrical engineers and material scientists demonstrated a research breakthrough that may result in wide-ranging advancements in electrical, optical, and computer technologies.
The Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering research group, led by distinguished professor Alexander Balandin, has shown in the laboratory the unique and practical function of newly created materials, which they called quantum composites.
These composites consist of small crystals of called “charge density wave quantum materials” incorporated within a polymer (large molecules with repeating structures) matrix. Upon heating or light exposure, charge density wave material undergoes a phase transition that leads to an unusual electrical response of the composites.
Compared to other materials that reveal quantum phenomena, the quantum composites created by Balandin’s group exhibited functionality at a much wider range of temperatures and had a greatly increased ability to store electricity, giving them an excellent potential for utility.
The University of California, Riverside, researchers describe the unique properties in a paper titled “Quantum Composites with Charge-Density-Wave Fillers” published in the journal Advanced Materials. The lead authors of the paper are Zahra Barani and Tekwam Geremew, UCR graduate students with the college’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, who synthesized and tested the composites. Another UCR graduate student Maedeh Taheri is a co-author who helped with electrical measurements. Balandin and Fariborz Kargar, an assistant adjunct professor and project scientist, are the corresponding authors.
The term quantum refers to materials and devices where electrons behave more like waves than particles. The wave nature of electrons can give materials unusual properties that are used in a new generation of computer, electronic and optic technologies.

Materials that reveal quantum phenomena are sought for building quantum computers that go beyond the limitations of most computing that is now based on chips that use binary bits for computations. Such materials are also sought for super-sensitive sensors used for various electronic and optic applications.
But the materials with quantum phenomena have major drawbacks, Balandin said.
“The problem with these materials is that the quantum phenomena are fragile and typically observed only at extremely low temperatures,” he said. “The defects and impurities destroy the electron wave function.”
Remarkably, the charge density wave material in the quantum composites created by Balandin’s lab exhibited functionality as high as 50º C above room temperature. This transition temperature is close to the temperature of the operation of computers and other electronic gadgets, which heat up when they operate. This temperature tolerance opens a possibility for a wide range of applications of quantum composites in electronics and energy storage.
The researchers also found that quantum composites have an unusually high dielectric constant – a metric that characterizes the material’s ability to store electricity. The dielectric constant of the electrically insulating composites increased by more than two orders of magnitude, which allows for smaller and more powerful capacitors used for energy storage.
“Energy storage capacitors can be found in battery-powered applications,” Balandin said. “Capacitors can be used to deliver peak power and provide energy for computer memory during an unexpected shut-off. Capacitors can charge and discharge faster compared to batteries. In order to broaden the use of capacitors for energy storage, one needs to increase the energy per volume. Our quantum composite material may help to achieve this goal.”
Another possible application for quantum composites is reflective coating. The change in the dielectric constant induced by heating, light exposure, or application of an electrical field can be used to change the light reflection from the glasses and windows coated with such composites.
“We hope that our ability to preserve the quantum condensate phases in the charge-density-wave materials even inside disordered composites and even above room temperature can become a game changer for many applications. It is a conceptually different approach for tuning the properties of composites that we use in everyday life,” Balandin added.
The team at UCR collaborated with Megan Stokey, Matthew Hilfiker, and Mathias Schubert, of the University of Nebraska, who conducted some of the optical measurements, and Nicholas Sesing and Tina Salguero of the University of Georgia, who synthesized an ingredient material used in the composite preparation at UCR. More

Supersolids are a relatively new and exciting area of research. They exhibit both solid and superfluid properties simultaneously. In 2019, three research groups were able to demonstrate this state for the first time beyond doubt in ultracold quantum gases, among them the research group led by Francesca Ferlaino from the Department of Experimental Physics at the University of Innsbruck and the ÖAW Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) in Innsbruck.
In 2021, Francesca Ferlaino’s team studied in detail the life cycle of supersolid states in a dipolar gas of dysprosium atoms. They observed something unexpected: “Our data suggested that an increase in temperature promotes the formation of supersolid structures,” recounts Claudia Politi of Francesca Ferlaino’s team. “This surprising behaviour was an important boost to theory, which had previously paid little attention to thermal fluctuations in this context.”
The Innsbruck scientists joined the force with the danish theoretical group led by Thomas Pohl to explore the effect of thermal fluctuation. They developed and published in Nature Communications a theoretical model that can explain the experimental results and underlines the thesis that heating the quantum liquid can lead to the formation of a quantum crystal. The theoretical model shows that as the temperature rises, these structures can form more easily.
“With the new model, we now have a phase diagram for the first time that shows the formation of a supersolid state as a function of temperature,” Francesca Ferlaino is delighted to say. “The surprising behavior, which contradicts our everyday observation, arises from the anisotropic nature of the dipole-dipole interaction of the strongly magnetic atoms of dysprosium.”
The research is an important step towards a better understanding of supersolid states of matter and was funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF, the European Research Council ERC and the European Union, among others. More

The nano-scale electronic parts in devices like smartphones are solid, static objects that once designed and built cannot transform into anything else. But University of California, Irvine physicists have reported the discovery of nano-scale devices that can transform into many different shapes and sizes even though they exist in solid states.
It’s a finding that could fundamentally change the nature of electronic devices, as well as the way scientists research atomic-scale quantum materials. The study is published recently in Science Advances.
“What we discovered is that for a particular set of materials, you can make nano-scale electronic devices that aren’t stuck together,” said Javier Sanchez-Yamagishi, an assistant professor of physics & astronomy whose lab performed the new research. “The parts can move, and so that allows us to modify the size and shape of a device after it’s been made.”
The electronic devices are modifiable much like refrigerator door magnets — stuck on but can be reconfigured into any pattern you like.
“The significance of this research is that it demonstrates a new property that can be utilized in these materials that allows for fundamentally different types of devices architectures to be realized, including mechanically reconfigure parts of a circuit,” said Ian Sequeira, a Ph.D student in Sanchez-Yamagishi’s lab.
If it sounds like science fiction, said Sanchez-Yamagishi, that’s because until now scientists did not think such a thing was possible.

Indeed, Sanchez-Yamagishi and his team, which also includes UCI Ph.D. student Andrew Barabas, weren’t even looking for what they ultimately discovered.
“It was definitely not what we were initially setting out to do,” said Sanchez-Yamagishi. “We expected everything to be static, but what happened was we were in the middle of trying to measure it, and we accidentally bumped into the device, and we saw that it moved.”
What they saw specifically was that tiny nano-scale gold wires could slide with very low friction on top of special crystals called “van der Waals materials.”
Taking advantage of these slippery interfaces, they made electronic devices made of single-atom thick sheets of a substance called graphene attached to gold wires that can be transformed into a variety of different configurations on the fly.
Because it conducts electricity so well, gold is a common part of electronic components. But exactly how the discovery could impact industries that use such devices is unclear.

“The initial story is more about the basic science of it, although it is an idea which could one day have an effect on industry,” said Sanchez-Yamagishi. “This germinates the idea of it.”
Meanwhile, the team expects their work could usher in a new era of quantum science research.
“It could fundamentally change how people do research in this field,” Sanchez-Yamagishi said.
“Researchers dream of having flexibility and control in their experiments, but there are a lot of restrictions when dealing with nanoscale materials,” he added. “Our results show that what was once thought to be fixed and static can be made flexible and dynamic.”
Other UCI co-authors include Yuhui Yang, a senior undergraduate at UCI, and postdoctoral scholar Aaron Barajas-Aguilar. More

Researchers in Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute (RI) have designed a system that makes an off-the-shelf quadruped robot nimble enough to walk a narrow balance beam — a feat that is likely the first of its kind.
“This experiment was huge,” said Zachary Manchester, an assistant professor in the RI and head of the Robotic Exploration Lab. “I don’t think anyone has ever successfully done balance beam walking with a robot before.”
By leveraging hardware often used to control satellites in space, Manchester and his team offset existing constraints in the quadruped’s design to improve its balancing capabilities.
The standard elements of most modern quadruped robots include a torso and four legs that each end in a rounded foot, allowing the robot to traverse basic, flat surfaces and even climb stairs. Their design resembles a four-legged animal, but unlike cheetahs who can use their tails to control sharp turns or falling cats that adjust their orientation in mid-air with the help of their flexible spines, quadruped robots do not have such instinctive agility. As long as three of the robot’s feet remain in contact with the ground, it can avoid tipping over. But if only one or two feet are on the ground, the robot can’t easily correct for disturbances and has a much higher risk of falling. This lack of balance makes walking over rough terrain particularly difficult.
“With current control methods, a quadruped robot’s body and legs are decoupled and don’t speak to one another to coordinate their movements,” Manchester said. “So how can we improve their balance?”
The team’s solution employs a reaction wheel actuator (RWA) system that mounts to the back of a quadruped robot. With the help of a novel control technique, the RWA allows the robot to balance independent of the positions of its feet.

RWAs are widely used in the aerospace industry to perform attitude control on satellites by manipulating the angular momentum of the spacecraft.
“You basically have a big flywheel with a motor attached,” said Manchester, who worked on the project with RI graduate student Chi-Yen Lee and mechanical engineering graduate students Shuo Yang and Benjamin Boksor. “If you spin the heavy flywheel one way, it makes the satellite spin the other way. Now take that and put it on the body of a quadruped robot.”
The team prototyped their approach by mounting two RWAs on a commercial Unitree A1 robot — one on the pitch axis and one on the roll axis — to provide control over the robot’s angular momentum. With the RWA, it doesn’t matter if the robot’s legs are in contact with the ground or not because the RWAs provide independent control of the body’s orientation.
Manchester said it was easy to modify an existing control framework to account for the RWAs because the hardware doesn’t change the robot’s mass distribution, nor does it have the joint limitations of a tail or spine. Without needing to account for such constraints, the hardware can be modeled like a gyrostat (an idealized model of a spacecraft) and integrated into a standard model-predictive control algorithm.
The team tested their system with a series of successful experiments that demonstrated the robot’s enhanced ability to recover from sudden impacts. In simulation, they mimicked the classic falling-cat problem by dropping the robot upside down from nearly half a meter, with the RWAs enabling the robot to reorient itself mid-air and land on its feet. On hardware, they showed the robot’s ability to recover from disturbances — as well as the system’s balancing capability — with an experiment where the robot walked along a 6-centimeter-wide balance beam.
Manchester predicts that quadruped robots will soon transition from being primarily research platforms in labs to widely available commercial-use products, similar to where drones were about 10 years ago. And with continued work to enhance a quadruped robot’s stabilizing capabilities to match the instinctual four-legged animals that inspired their design, they could be used in high-stakes scenarios like search-and-rescue in the future.
“Quadrupeds are the next big thing in robots,” Manchester said. “I think you’re going to see a lot more of them in the wild in the next few years.”
Video: https://youtu.be/tH3oP2s3NOQ More