PITTSBURGH--Kitchen robots are a popular vision of the future, but if a robot of today tries to grasp a kitchen staple such as a clear measuring cup or a shiny knife, it likely won't be able to.

Techniques for optical acquisition of physical objects and their surroundings lie at the heart of virtual reality (VR) systems and material design applications, but the digitization process becomes ...

Illustration of a thin, dense vapor of quantum emitters (blue disk) interacting with an incident electromagnetic field. Physicists have shown that strong dipole-dipole interactions in the quantum ...

While this system works well enough on relatively dull opaque objects, it has problems with transparent items that much of the light passes through, or shiny objects that scatter the reflected light.

Translucent aerogel bricks could outperform their opaque counterparts By Ben Coxworth April 20, 2023 An illustration depicting how the translucent bricks might be used in a load-bearing wall Empa View ...

Flexible, transparent lithium-ion batteries have been made by a team of researchers at Stanford University in California, a technological leap that could spawn see-through electronic gadgets such as ...

If you think X-rays and other forms of radiation have a monopoly on penetrating opaque objects, visible light begs to differ. It actually can pass through things like paint and human tissue, which has ...

Picking up transparent objects is hard when you’re a robot. Many of the traditional cameras and sensors just can’t get a good enough view to tell the grasper where to go. The light from infrared ...

Transparent plastic is nothing new. However, 3D prints are usually opaque or–at best–translucent. [Thomas Sanladerer] wanted to print something really transparent. He noticed that Colorfabb had an ...

Kitchen robots are a popular vision of the future, but if a robot of today tries to grasp a kitchen staple such as a clear measuring cup or a shiny knife, it likely won't be able to. Transparent and ...