New ideas to increase the safety and reliability of multicopters have become critical to optimizing maintenance activities, reducing fatalities in unmanned aircraft, increasing surveillance reliability in drones, and improving mission effectiveness in vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft.

Space exploration within the commercial, business, and military sectors continues to increase, and the development of an autonomous navigation system capable of guidance navigation anywhere in the solar system free from the use of Earthbound orbiting satellites is required to ensure that these operations can be performed safely and accurately. Researchers at Rensselaer created a wide field-of-view (FoV) optical system for use as a StarNAV sensor with the potential to be mounted onto a spacecraft vehicle for use in measuring the velocity of the vessel during interstellar flights.

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a technology which could improve VLSI testing by allowing for non-destructive testing of VLSI circuits under bias for electronic systems. With this new technology, researchers have focused on improving testing output as chip density increases along with decreasing chip sizes. Terahertz radiation (and related radiation at other frequencies – RF, sub-THz) is used to illuminate the chip under the test.

Commonly implanted medical devices containing metal parts (i.e., dental fillings, coils, hip replacements) generate streaks in computed tomography (CT) images, thereby impeding diagnosis and interfering with radiation therapy planning. Inventors at RPI created a novel technique to boost the efficacy of neural networks for metal artifact reduction (MAR) in CT images. Currently, deep neural network-based techniques need to be trained on synthetic, paired images. Unfortunately, these images may not accurately reflect clinical reality and technical factors.

Researchers at RPI are developing a cognitive logic-enabled AI that can operate on multiple screens and in multiple environments for the K-12 sector. Declining public school math and science test scores have concerned American politicians and educators since the 1980s. This educational failure coincides with the large number of employees unable to fill the growing number of technology and engineering-related jobs. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic has further complicated the K-12 STEM education crisis.

Advances in the semiconductor industry continue to be desired to address demand for semiconductor devices capable of high performance and low power consumption in a wide variety of applications. In one or more applications, enhanced high-voltage semiconductor devices such as, enhanced Schottky diodes, p-i-n diodes, insulated-gate bipolar transistors (IGBT), bipolar junction transistors (BJTs), etc., may be desired for, for instance, high-speed power switching applications.

This technology relates to adaptive optical devices, and particularly to liquid lenses. Such optical devices avoid the increased weight and fabrication complexity associated with moving solid lenses. This technology utilizes a lens magnification control for adjusting magnification of the liquid lens by increasing a volume of protruding liquid residing in a chamber.

This technology relates to visually-guided multiprobe microassembly for assembling micro-electromechanical (MEMS) devices from multiple parts that are assembled rather than using bulk-processes to produce devices monolithically. Current production technologies primarily use a single wafer that is process chemically to produce finished devices. While this is useful for many devices, it results in mechanical regions that exist primarily in the plane and do not have fully spatial mechanisms without significant depth of stacked parts.

This technology relates to detecting radiation by directing an optical beam into a volume of gas, ionizing a portion of the volume of gas with the optical beam to produce a plasma, and then detecting an acoustic signal produced from an interaction of a radiation wave with the plasma. This technology relates to the phenomenon of enhanced acoustic emission from laser-induced plasma under the influence of a single-cycle terahertz pulse. Aspects of this technology bridge the unintentional gap between THz photonics and photo-acoustics.

This technology relates to liquid lenses, which are adaptive optical elements that avoid some of the drawbacks of mechanical optical elements, such as delayed movements and excess weight. This technology provides an oscillating liquid lens that includes a liquid drop with first and second droplet portions, a second liquid, and a drive that oscillates the liquid drop within a channel of a substrate.