Research

Stanford engineers have developed a new prototype that enables electric cars, robots or drones to wirelessly charge as they drive on roads, factory floors or hover on rooftops. Their first effort three years ago which incorporated an amplifier and feedback resistor, transmitted 10% of the power flowing through the system. Replacing the original amplifier with a "switch mode" amplifier and additional work designing a circuit configuration, boosts the wireless transmission efficiency to 92%.

Using a process called inverse design, a team of researchers lead by Jelena Vuckovic has developed the circuit layout for a lidar-on-a-chip prototype they built in the Stanford nanofabrication facility. The team believes shrinking the mechanical and electronic components to a single chip could lead to a lidar mass produced for as little as a few hundred dollars.

A snapshot of the various efforts of Stanford students from across disciplines and schools to address the challenges of COVID-19. They have stepped up to help their communities with resourceful projects from mapping where local schoolchildren can receive free meals (left), an app that alerts people to possible COVID-19 infections to an incubator to support projects fighting COVID-19. See their projects here.

Scientists at SLAC and Stanford have found a way to turn a complex oxide known as LCMO, a normally brittle material, into a flexible membrane by using micromanipulators to stretch it on a tiny apparatus and then gluing it in place to preserve the stretch. By applying gentle heat to melt the glue they could flip it from being an insulator to a conductor and back again. Scientists want to be able to control and fine-tune this behavior for a new generation of electronics with applications in power transmission, transportation, computing, sensors and detectors.

A letter signed by over 200 economic, legal and financial scholars from across the political spectrum was released on March 24 denouncing plans for massive bailouts of businesses hurt by the coronavirus pandemic and not to benefit workers who are most affected by the sudden loss of jobs. Economists argue that corporate bailouts mainly benefit investors who reaped big returns when the economy was strong and will now be protected when the economy goes south. The legacies of the 2008 and 2009 bailouts was a feeling by many that our system is rigged to benefit the top 1%. 

In this Future of Everything podcast, Nick Ouellette, associate professor, civil engineering, discusses with Russ Altman his study of flocks of birds in-flight and how tightly coordinated patterns of behaviors from nature can be applied to crowd control and autonomous cars.

Stanford researchers have developed a soft robot that can change its shape, allowing it to grab and handle objects and roll in controllable directions. Called an "isoperimetric robot" by researchers because although the shape changes, the total length of the edges - and the amount of air inside - remains the same. Applications include home and workplaces where traditional robots could cause injury, disaster response and space exploration.

A Stanford Graduate School of Business operational expert discusses ways companies can manage their global supply chains in light of trade wars and the coronavirus epidemic. Operational hedging strategies which include awareness of issues within and outside of supply chains, building flexibility into the production process and increasing logistical flexibility help manufacturers manage uncertainties.

To get to a future of quantum technologies Stanford researchers in collaboration with labs at Harvard University and University of Technology Sydney are investigating hexagonal boron nitride which can emit bright light at room temperature as a single photon - a quantum unit of light - at a time. Their work to understand hexagonal boron nitride's defect of emitting light in a rainbow of different hues with the goal to control its properties, will open the door to the development of quantum optical technologies.

Founder of Stanford's Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, or d.school, David M. Kelley has been awarded the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) 2020 prize for educational innovation. Kelley developed a curriculum for design thinking which students have used as a framework to cultivate empathy and creativity to solve human challenges in addition to technical ones.