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The UT Austin Villa team won 3rd prize at the RoboCup@Home 2017 competition in Nagoya, in the category of Domestic Standard Platform League.

The UT Austin Villa Robotics Team recently won third place at the RoboCup@Home 2017 competition, in the category of Domestic Standard Platform League. The competition was held in Nagoya, Japan. Robocup was originally founded by Japanese researchers to develop robots that could play soccer well enough to eventually defeat world champion players. The idea was playfully implemented in order to fuse robot engineering with artificial intelligence and development. Now the original goal of the competition has expanded to include other areas and goals of robotics.

Engineers and scientists at The University of Texas at Austin and the AMOLF institute in the Netherlands have invented the first mechanical metamaterials that easily transfer motion effortlessly in one direction while blocking it in the other, as described in a paper published on Feb. 13 in Nature. The material can be thought of as a mechanical one-way shield that blocks energy from coming in but easily transmits it going out the other side.

Join Prof. Andrea Alù as he shares insight into his work with metamaterials, light and an "invisibility cloak." 

Image: Erik Zumalt, The University of Texas at Austin Profs. Andrea Alù and Mikhail Belkin in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin have created a new nonlinear metasurface, or meta mirror, that could one day enable the miniaturization of laser systems.