14 DAY TRIAL // Over the years, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has been at the forefront of innovation in all things technical, and its role has been further restated recently, when the university has presented the projects it was working on. Designed to improve the life of future generations, and to answer some of the gravest problems we are faced with today, inventions such as the City Car are still a few years away, but they hold a great promise to a better tomorrow.
With over $500 million in research funds, and some 10,000 students, the university is among the world leaders as far as education and innovation go. Notoriously hard to get into, MIT is also the place where students have great opportunities to show what they're made of. From such a challenge emerged the underlying concept of the City Car, which is a very compact vehicle, capable of folding into itself, and also powered by electricity. It is designed to function as a sustainable vehicle in all its aspects, as it does not take a lot of room to park, and also almost no maintenance costs.
“It has displays, batteries onboard and different control systems that help us use the vehicle. But the key feature of this is the wheel itself. Instead of having a traditional drive train with mechanics throughout the vehicle, we can localize everything to the wheel itself and do things like turn the wheel a full 120 degrees which allows us to have the vehicle spin on a dime, translate sideways, give you all the freedoms and movements that you might get just moving around as we do as humans today,” MIT research assistant William Lark explained, quoted by the BBC Click.
In addition to the City Car, which is like an airport cart, able to charge from its station while stacked, students and professors at MIT have also developed an all-electric bicycle, also capable of folding, in which the motor and the battery are integrated in the hub of the wheel, rather than anywhere visible on the machine. Among MIT's world-famous robots, we mention the flying ornithopter, a robot that is able to learn how to fly each time it does it, and improves constantly, as well as a dog that can navigate its way around, establishing the best routes to follow all on its own.