Mechanical Engineering

Hands-free tech adds realistic sense of touch in extended reality

Rice mechanical engineers and their collaborators have demonstrated a new hands-free approach to convey realistic haptic feedback in virtual reality.

​​​​​​​Scientific AI’s ‘black box’ is no match for 200-year-old method

Rice engineers discovered a 200-year-old technique called Fourier analysis can reveal crucial information about how a form of artificial intelligence called a deep neural network learns to perform tasks involving complex physics.

People, papers and presentations for Dec. 19, 2022

Minjae Kim, assistant professor of management in organizational behavior at the Jones Graduate School of Business, was ranked one of 2022’s 50 best undergraduate business professors by Poets and Quants.

IEEE honors Kavraki, Richards-Kortum, Truchard

Two renowned Rice University professors and a longtime backer have won prestigious honors in the 2023 IEEE Awards.

Rice funds new research collaborations with Houston Methodist

Rice and Houston Methodist have awarded seed grants for research in robotics, imaging, cardiovascular bioengineering, and psychological and behavioral health.

Engineers go further with the flow to model moving cars and tires

Mechanical engineers dramatically advance computational fluid dynamics models of airflow around a moving car and its tires.

People, papers and presentations for Oct. 31, 2022

Lydia Kavraki and Marcia O’Malley are among 35 scientists named Oct. 25 to a list of the world’s top women scientists in robotics, energy and science at the iROS Kyoto 2022 Conference in Japan.

Fluidic circuits add analog options for controlling soft robots

Soft robotics researchers from Rice and Harvard have created a nonelectronic control system that uses air to process information.

Wehmeyer team receives $1.5 million NSF grant

A team of researchers headed by Geoff Wehmeyer, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Rice, has received a $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s Partnerships for International Research and Education (PIRE) program to support work on large-scale materials made from oriented carbon nanotubes.

Wearables take ‘logical’ step toward onboard control

Rice University engineers design fluidic logic into garments to help people with functional limitations perform tasks without electronic assistance.

Powering an ‘arm’ with air could be mighty handy

Rice University mechanical engineers develop a textile-based energy harvesting shoe able to power assistive devices for people with disabilities.

Biomedical, data science training wins new grant

The Rice University NLM Training Program in Biomedical Informatics and Data Science wins a $4.16 million National Library of Medicine grant.

Rice, NASA extend Space Act Agreement

Rice and NASA extend their pact to share research and outreach through a Space Act Agreement.

Record 17 Rice University graduate students named GEM Fellows

A record 17 graduate students at Rice University have been named 2022 Fellows of the National Graduate Education for Minorities Consortium.

People, papers and presentations for Aug. 15, 2022

A paper co-authored by postdoctoral research associate Mohammad Salehi and President Reginald DesRoches, a professor of civil and environmental engineering and of mechanical engineering, was selected as the featured article for a recent volume of the journal Engineering Structures.