2025-08-22 23:30:04
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.
Enjoy today’s videos!
The First World Humanoid Robot Games Conclude Successfully! Unitree Strikes Four Golds (1500m, 400m, 100m Obstacle, 4×100m Relay).
[ Unitree ]
Steady! PNDbotics Adam has become the only full-size humanoid robot athlete to successfully finish the 100m Obstacle Race at the World Humanoid Robot Games!
[ PNDbotics ]
Introducing Field Foundation Models (FFMs) from FieldAI—a new class of “physics-first” foundation models built specifically for embodied intelligence. Unlike conventional vision or language models retrofitted for robotics, FFMs are designed from the ground up to grapple with uncertainty, risk, and the physical constraints of the real world. This enables safe and reliable robot behaviors when managing scenarios that they have not been trained on, navigating dynamic, unstructured environments without prior maps, GPS, or predefined paths.
[ Field AI ]
Multiply Labs, leveraging Universal Robots’ collaborative robots, has developed a groundbreaking robotic cluster that is fundamentally transforming the manufacturing of life-saving cell and gene therapies. The Multiply Labs solution drives a staggering 74% cost reduction and enables up to 100x more patient doses per square foot of cleanroom.
[ Universal Robots ]
In this video, we put Vulcan V3, the world’s first ambidextrous humanoid robotic hand capable of performing the full American Sign Language (ASL) alphabet, to the ultimate test—side by side with a real human!
[ Hackaday ]
Thanks, Kelvin!
More robots need to have this form factor.
Robotic vacuums are so pervasive now that it’s easy to forget how much of an icon the iRobot Roomba has been.
[ iRobot ]
This is quite possibly the largest robotic hand I’ve ever seen.
[ CAFE Project ] via [ BUILT ]
Modular robots built by Dartmouth researchers are finding their feet outdoors. Engineered to assemble into structures that best suit the task at hand, the robots are pieced together from cube-shaped robotic blocks that combine rigid rods and soft, stretchy strings whose tension can be adjusted to deform the blocks and control their shape.
[ Dartmouth ]
Our quadruped robot X30 has completed extreme-environment missions in Hoh Xil—supporting patrol teams, carrying vital supplies and protecting fragile ecosystems.
[ DEEP Robotics ]
We propose a base-shaped robot named “koboshi” that moves everyday objects. This koboshi has a spherical surface in contact with the floor, and by moving a weight inside using built-in motors, it can rock up and down, and side to side. By placing everyday items on this koboshi, users can impart new movement to otherwise static objects. The koboshi is equipped with sensors to measure its posture, enabling interaction with users. Additionally, it has communication capabilities, allowing multiple units to communicate with each other.
[ Paper ]
Bi-LAT is the world’s first Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model that integrates bilateral control into imitation learning, enabling robots to adjust force levels based on natural language instructions.
[ Bi-LAT ] to be presented at [ IEEE RO-MAN 2025 ]
Thanks, Masato!
Look at this jaunty little guy!
Although, they very obviously cut the video right before it smashes face-first into furniture more than once.
[ Paper ] to be presented at [ 2025 IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robotics ]
This research has been conducted at the Human Centered Robotics Lab at UT Austin. The video shows our latest experimental bipedal robot, dubbed Mercury, which has passive feet. This means that there are no actuated ankles, unlike humans, forcing Mercury to gain balance by dynamically stepping.
[ University of Texas at Austin Human Centered Robotics Lab ]
We put two RIVR delivery robots to work with an autonomous vehicle—showing how Physical AI can handle the full last mile, from warehouse to consumers’ doorsteps.
[ Rivr ]
The KR TITAN ultra is a high-performance industrial robot weighing 4.6 tonnes and capable of handling payloads up to 1.5 tonnes.
[ Kuka ]
CMU MechE’s Ding Zhao and Ph.D. student Yaru Niu describe LocoMan, a robotic assistant they have been developing.
[ Carnegie Mellon University ]
Twenty-two years ago, Silicon Valley executive Henry Evans had a massive stroke that left him mute and paralyzed from the neck down. But that didn’t prevent him from becoming a leading advocate of adaptive robotic tech to help disabled people—or from writing country songs, one letter at a time. Correspondent John Blackstone talks with Evans about his upbeat attitude and unlikely pursuits.
[ CBS News ]
2025-08-22 21:00:03
China, Russia, and the United States are racing to put nuclear power plants on the moon. China and Russia in May agreed to work together to complete a lunar nuclear reactor by 2036. In response, NASA’s interim chief Sean Duffy announced in August that the United States would fast track its lunar nuclear power program to have one ready by 2030.
But this sudden frenzy raises a few questions—such as why do we want nuclear reactors on the moon in the first place? And how would they work? To find out, IEEE Spectrum spoke with Katy Huff, a nuclear engineer and the director of the Advanced Reactor Fuel Cycles Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Huff previously served as the assistant secretary for nuclear energy at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).
Why do the world’s biggest space organizations want nuclear reactors on the moon, and what would they power?
Katy Huff: There’s a growing interest in having a more sustained presence of humans on the moon for scientific discovery. Resources like helium-3, which can serve as a fusion fuel, may be part of the appeal. NASA is planning to build this kind of lunar exploration base through its Artemis program, and China and Russia are working together to build one called the International Lunar Research Station. Any such lunar base would absolutely need nuclear power. Renewables alone are too intermittent to meet the energy needs of life on the moon. Plus, the cost of getting things into space scales by mass, so the unmatched energy density of uranium fission is our greatest opportunity.
Why is it suddenly a race? What’s the urgency?
Huff: The momentum began with the fission surface power project at NASA, which a few years ago solicited designs for 40-kilowatt lunar microreactors. Three designs were selected and awarded US $5 million each. Since then, China and Russia have announced on at least three occasions a joint effort to design their own lunar microreactor with a launch target in the mid-2030s. In response, NASA is accelerating its timeline for the U.S. reactor to 2030 and increasing the target power capacity to 100 kW. Sean Duffy has said publicly that if China and Russia are the first to stake a claim for a lunar power plant, they could declare a de facto keep-out zone, limiting the United States’ options to site its base. So the U.S. aims to get there before China and Russia to claim a region with access to water ice, which aids life support for astronauts.
What are the considerations for designing a nuclear reactor for the moon?
Huff: In very low gravity, fluids won’t behave exactly as they do on Earth. So the circulation patterns for the reactor’s fluid coolants will need to be recalculated. And the moon’s large temperature swings, which vary hundreds of degrees from lunar day to night, will require the reactor to use systems that are more isolated from those swings. On Earth we eject waste heat easily because there are thermally stable heat sinks like water bodies available.
What kind of reactor do you expect NASA to choose?
Katy Huff previously served as the assistant secretary for nuclear energy at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).Katy Huff
Huff: It would make sense if NASA chose one of the three designs previously selected for the fission surface power program, rather than starting from scratch. But with the over-doubling of target capacity, from 40 kW to 100 kW, there will be a bit of a redesign involved, because you don’t just turn up the knob. The three awards went to Lockheed Martin/BWXT, Westinghouse/Aerojet Rocketdyne, and X-energy/Boeing. Some of them are developing microreactors that are based around tristructural isotropic [TRISO] fuel, which is a type of highly robust uranium fuel, so I would expect the lunar reactor to be designed using that. For the coolant, I don’t expect them to choose water, because water’s thermal properties limit the range of temperatures it can cool effectively, which constrains reactor efficiency. And I don’t expect it to be liquid salt either, because it can be corrosive, and this lunar reactor needs to operate for 10 years with no intervention. So I suspect they’ll choose a gas such as helium. And then for power conversion, NASA’s directive explicitly said that a closed Brayton cycle would be a requirement.
What would transport and startup look like?
Huff: The reactor would be fully constructed on Earth and ready to go, with the fuel in place. My expectation is that it would be transported with the control elements fully inserted into the reactor to prevent a chain reaction from starting during transit. Once on the moon, a startup sequence would be initiated remotely or by the astronauts there. The control rods would then withdraw from the reactor, and a small neutron source like californium-252 would kick off the reaction.
A deadline of 2030 feels pretty rushed considering the United States doesn’t have a final design for the reactor, nor firm plans for a lunar base.
Huff: Right. That timeline does appear ambitious. We’ll have a hard enough time getting a reactor of this scale deployed as a prototype terrestrially in the next four and a half years. Getting one launch-ready and onto the moon by then is a recipe for eventually having to explain why we didn’t meet that timeline. And that could be a problem, reputationally, for nuclear energy more so than space exploration because people love NASA. Little kids and grown-ups alike wear NASA T-shirts. No one’s wearing DOE T-shirts.
What are the risks if something goes wrong with the launch?
Huff: Beautifully enough, fresh uranium fuel doesn’t present a radiological hazard the way spent uranium would. Only after it becomes the fission products is it significantly radioactive. So as long as the reactor doesn’t operate before launch, the hazard is quite low. Even if the fuel were dispersed over the Earth, it wouldn’t pose a significant danger to the people around it. I literally have a sample of uranium sitting by my desk. On top of that, there’s a robust launch safety protocol already established for any radiological object. NASA has a lot of experience with this from sending plutonium thermoelectric generators, which are more like a nuclear battery, for previous missions.
Things have gone wrong with some of the fission reactors previously launched into space; what happened to those?
Huff: The biggest fission reactors anyone has launched into space were the 5 kW electric TOPAZ-I reactors that were part of the Soviet program. One of them had a serious incident and broke apart. It’s now in high orbit in pieces, including some of its sodium coolant, which is just sort of floating around up there as liquid metal spheres. But that doesn’t impact the Earth because it’s a tiny amount of radiological source material at an incredible distance from Earth. The more unfortunate incident happened with the Soviet Kosmos 954 reactor, which, after operating in orbit, experienced uncontrolled reentry and disintegrated over a 600-kilometer swath of Canadian territory.
What happens if an asteroid hits the moon or directly hits the lunar nuclear reactor?
Huff: A direct strike could damage the reactor and cause localized dispersion of the fuel. This might be a motivation to use TRISO fuel. It’s so robust because the fuel and fission products are housed in thousands of spherical, chia seed–size particles that are coated in silicon carbide. It can withstand incredible impacts and heat—well beyond the temperature of lava. Testing has shown that even when subjected to 1,700°C heat for 300 hours, TRISO retains its fission products with no failures. So in the unlikely event that there’s a dead-on collision with a large asteroid at the reactor site, the debris of the reactor may be distributed in the dust of the moon, but all those little TRISO particles will hopefully remain intact.
2025-08-22 02:00:03
CT scanning, streaming videos, and sending images over the Internet wouldn’t be possible without the Fast Fourier transform. Commonly known as FFT, the computer algorithm designed by researchers at Princeton University and IBM is found in just about every electronic device, according to an entry in the Engineering and Technology History Wiki.
Demonstrated for the first time in 1964 by IEEE Fellows John Tukey and James W. Cooley, the algorithm breaks down a signal—a series of values over time—and converts it into frequencies. FFT was 100 times faster than the existing discrete Fourier transform. The DFT also requires more memory than the FFT because it saves intermediate results while processing.
The FFT has become an important tool for manipulating and analyzing signals in many areas including audio processing, telecommunications, digital broadcasting, and image analysis. It helps filter, compress, eliminate noise from, and otherwise modify signals.
The 60-year-old ubiquitous computer code also has applications in today’s cutting-edge technologies such as AI, quantum computing, self-driving cars, and 5G communication systems.
The FFT was commemorated with an IEEE Milestone during a ceremony held in May at Princeton University.
“The Cooley-Tukey algorithm significantly accelerated the calculation of DFTs,” 2024 IEEE President Tom Coughlin said at the ceremony. “Prior methods required significantly more computations, making FFT a revolutionary breakthrough. By leveraging algebraic properties and periodicities, the FFT reduced the number of the operations, making it particularly and practically feasible for everyday tasks, replacing the less efficient analog methods.”
In 1963 Tukey, a professor of mathematics and statistics at Princeton, participated in a meeting of U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s Science Advisory Committee to discuss ways to detect underground nuclear tests, according to the ETHW entry.
Also attending that meeting was Richard Garwin, a physicist and engineer at IBM who played a key role in designing the first hydrogen bomb. He died in May. Read about his fascinating life in this month’s In Memoriam.
Tukey told Garwin he was working on speeding up the computation of an existing method—the Fourier transform—thinking it might help with the detection. His algorithm mathematically converted a signal from its original domain, such as time or space, to a frequency domain.
Garwin recognized its potential and asked IBM to select a mathematical analyst to collaborate with Tukey. That person was Cooley, a research staff member working on numerical analysis and computation projects.
If the Fourier transform could be made faster, Garwin said, seismometers could be planted in the ground in countries surrounding the Soviet Union to detect nuclear explosions from atomic bomb tests, because the Soviets wouldn’t allow on-site tests, according to Cooley’s oral history in the Engineering and Technology History Wiki. A seismometer measures ground vibrations, which are converted into electrical signals and recorded as seismograms.
To design sensors for underground nuclear tests, however, “you would have to process all the seismic signals, and a large part of the processing could be done by Fourier transforms,” Cooley said in his oral history. But “the computing power at the time was not enough to process all of the signals you’d need to do this.”
The FFT could calculate a seismic sensor’s frequency and produce images, IEEE Life Fellow Harold S. Stone said at the Milestone event. He is an image processing researcher and Fellow emeritus at the NEC Laboratories America, in Princeton, and a former IBM researcher.
Tukey and Cooley led the team that wrote the computer code that demonstrated the FFT’s power.
“The demonstration of the Coley-Tukey algorithm showed that it was 100 times faster,” Stone said. “It was so fast that it could keep up with the seismic data.”
Sensors using the algorithm were planted, and they detected nuclear explosions within a 15-kilometer radius from where they were detonated, according to the ETHW entry.
“By leveraging algebraic properties and periodicities, the FFT reduced the number of the operations, making it particularly and practically feasible for everyday tasks, replacing the less efficient analog methods.” —2024 IEEE President Tom Coughlin
In 1965 Cooley and Tukey published “An Algorithm for the Machine Calculation of Complex Fourier Series,” describing the FFT process. The seminal paper spurred development of digital signal processing technologies.
For his work, Tukey was awarded a U.S. National Medal of Science in 1973. He also received the 1982 IEEE Medal of Honor for “contributions to the spectral analysis of random processes and the fast Fourier transform algorithm.”
Cooley, who received the 2002 IEEE Kilby Signal Processing Medal for pioneering the FFT, was a leading figure in the field of digital signal processing. Through his involvement with the IEEE Digital Signal Processing Committee (today known as the IEEE Signal Processing Society), he helped establish terminology and suggested research directions.
Although not one of the inventors, Garwin is credited with recognizing that the algorithm had wider applications, especially in scientific and engineering fields.
“In today’s lingo, Garwin helped the FFT ‘go viral’ by getting Cooley and Tukey together,” Stone said.
“Garwin and Tukey sought better information to forestall and prevent wars,” added Frank Anscombe, Tukey’s nephew. “The Cooley-Tukey FFT swiftly advanced this cause by giving a practical, simplifying solution for wavy data. Thanks to the FFT, a technological rubicon began to be crossed: analog-to-digital machines.”
Like so many innovations, the FFT came out of a collaboration between industry and academia, and it should be recognized for that, IEEE Fellow Andrea Goldsmith said at the ceremony. She explained that she regularly works with FFT in her research projects. At the time of the event, she was Princeton’s dean of engineering and applied sciences. This month she started her new position as president of Stony Brook University, in New York.
“Taking the ideas we have from basic research in our university labs, talking to people in industry, and understanding how the research problems we work on can benefit industry either tomorrow or in five years or 20 years from now, is incredibly important,” she said. “Some people think of engineering as boring and dry and something that only nerds do, but there is such beauty and creativity in a lot of the innovations that we have developed, and I think the FFT is a perfect example of that.”
The FFT joins more than 270 other IEEE Milestones. They are more than a marker of achievement, said IEEE Life Senior Member Bala S. Prasanna, director of IEEE Region 1.
“They are a testament to human ingenuity, perseverance, and the spirit of collaboration,” Prasanna said. “These Milestones were more than just breakthroughs; they became catalysts for innovation, enabling progress in ways once thought impossible. Each one ensures that the story behind these innovations is preserved, not just as history but as inspiration for future generations.”
Another ceremony was held on 11 June at the IBM Watson Research Center.
Milestone plaques recognizing the FFT are on display in the lobby of Princeton’s School of Engineering and Applied Science and in the main lobby at the entrance of the IBM research center.
They read:
“In 1964 a computer program implementing a highly efficient Fourier analysis algorithm was demonstrated at IBM Research. Jointly developed by Princeton University and IBM collaborators, the Cooley-Tukey technique calculated discrete Fourier transforms orders of magnitude faster than had been previously demonstrated. Known as the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), its speed impacted numerous applications including computerized tomography, audio and video compression, signal processing, and real-time data streaming.”
Administered by the IEEE History Center and supported by donors, the Milestone program recognizes outstanding technical developments around the world. The IEEE Princeton Central Jersey Section sponsored the nomination.2025-08-20 21:05:03
My name is Engineer Bainomugisha. Yes, Engineer is my first name and also my career. My parents named me Engineer, and they recognized engineering traits in me from childhood, such as perseverance, resilience, and wanting to understand how things work.
I grew up and spent my early years in a rural part of Uganda, more than 300 kilometers outside of Kampala, the capital city. As a young boy, I was always tinkering and hustling: I harvested old radio batteries to power lighting, created household utensils from wood, and herded animals and sold items to help the village make money.
Two perspectives on engineering education in Africa
Johnson I. Ejimanya is a one-man pony express. Walking the exhaust-fogged streets of Owerri, Nigeria, Ejimanya, the engineering dean of the Federal University of Technology, Owerri, carries with him a department’s worth of communications, some handwritten, others on disk. He’s delivering them to a man with a PC and an Internet connection who converts the missives into e-mails and downloads the responses. To Ejimanya, broadband means lugging a big bundle of printed e-mails back with him to the university, which despite being one of the country’s largest and most prestigious engineering schools, has no reliable means of connecting to the Internet.
I met Ejimanya when I visited Nigeria in 2003 to report on how the SAT-3/WASC, the first undersea fiber-optic cable to connect West Africa to the world, was being used. (The passage above is from my February 2004 IEEE Spectrum article “Surf Africa.”) Beyond the lack of computers and Internet access, I saw labs filled with obsolete technology from the 1960s. If students needed a computer or to get online, they went to an Internet cafe, their out-of-pocket costs a burden on them and their families.
So is the situation any better 20-plus years on? The short answer is yes. But as computer science professor Engineer Bainomugisha and IEEE student member Oluwatosin Kolade attest in the following pages, there’s still a long way to go.
Both men are engineers but at different stages of their academic journey: Bainomugisha went to college in the early 2000s and is now a computer science professor at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. Kolade is in his final semester as a mechanical engineering student at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ilé-Ifẹ̀, Nigeria. They describe the challenges they face and what they see as the path forward for a continent brimming with aspiring engineers but woefully short on the resources necessary for a robust education.
—Harry Goldstein
In high school, I studied physics, chemistry, maths, and biology. When I started studying at Makerere University, in Kampala, I joined the computer science program. This was in 2003. I had never interfaced with a computer before, and this was true for many of my classmates. The limited number of computers meant that student Internet cafés were common, requiring one to pay 500 Ugandan shillings (US $0.14) for 30 minutes. Access to programmable hardware was limited, with no access to microcontrollers or hardware manufacturing.
Once I got the basic introduction to computer science, I was eager to build things with what was available to solve problems for the people around me. At the time, phones were very limited, and it was expensive to make calls, so SMS text messages were very popular. Students, the majority of whom didn’t own phones, needed some way to send texts without one. In my first year, I built a free Web-based SMS platform that allowed people to send messages easily. It quickly gained popularity among university students—a good outcome for my first “product.”
After I graduated in 2006 with a bachelor’s degree in computer science, Professor Venansius Baryamureeba, then the dean of the faculty of computing and information technology at Makerere, inspired me to apply for graduate school in Belgium. I received a scholarship to pursue a master’s degree at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Free University of Brussels).
There, I encountered Arduino microcontroller boards for the first time. I witnessed undergraduate students using Arduino boards and sensors to implement embedded-systems projects, such as autonomous devices that could detect, identify, sense, and control their surroundings. I wondered how long it would take for universities in Africa to gain access to such hardware. After all, Arduino’s motto is “Empowering anyone to innovate,” but unfortunately, that empowerment had yet to reach sub-Saharan Africa.
Fast forward to today, and the situation has drastically changed. Laptops are now widely available in Africa, Internet connectivity is faster, and smartphones and mobile Internet are common among computer science faculty and students. But the lag between the launch of a technology and its availability in Africa remains significant, as Oluwatosin Kolade’s story illustrates [see “Lessons from a Janky Drone,”].
Africa has immense potential for computer science and electronics engineering to address a wide range of challenges. Existing software solutions may be insufficient, and the public digital infrastructure may be lacking, so projects at the intersection of hardware and software could fill critical gaps. However, it is crucial for students to get better learning opportunities to interact with and build physical systems. There is a wide range of exciting applications in agriculture, transportation, education, and environmental monitoring, which is likely why Kolade’s engineering professor encouraged his team’s surveillance drone project despite the difficulties they encountered.
While the bottlenecks in hardware access for students and researchers in Africa have eased since my time as a student, obstacles persist. As Kolade attests, significant challenges exist in both scholastic funding and the supply chain. This hampers learning and places a large financial burden on young people. As Kolade explains, students must fund their undergraduate projects out of their own pockets, creating significant barriers for people with limited financial resources.
The AirQo project [circuit boards shown here] gives students access to 3D printers, soldering stations, and basic sensor boards and components.Andrew Esiebo
Electronics components must often be sourced from outside the continent, primarily from China, Europe, or the United States. While the number of online stores has increased, the time span from order to delivery can be several months. It is not uncommon for affordable shipping options to require 60 days or more, while faster delivery options can be several times more expensive than the hardware itself. Online shopping, while often necessary, presents an unavoidable complexity for students and faculty, especially if they have limited access to credit and debit cards. By contrast, students in Europe can receive their components within a week, allowing them to complete a hardware project and initiate new iterations before their counterparts in Africa even receive their hardware for initial building. What’s more, some vendors may choose not to ship to addresses in Africa due to transit risks coupled with real or perceived customs complexities.
Customs and tax clearance procedures can indeed be burdensome, with import duties of up to 75 percent in some countries. While some countries in the region offer tax exemptions for educational resources, such exemptions are often difficult to obtain for individual components, or the procedures are unclear and cumbersome. Local vendors, mostly startups and tech hubs, are emerging, but they often lack sufficient stock and may not be able to fulfill bulk orders from educational institutions.
In light of these challenges, universities and students might be tempted to shift their focus to purely software projects or otherwise alter their priorities. However, this limits both education and innovation. Engineering projects that involve both hardware and software awaken students’ creativity and foster in-depth skills acquisition.
Africa must seek viable solutions. University programs should increase their support of students by providing access to specialized makerspaces and fabrication hubs equipped with the necessary hardware and electronic components. The emergence of high-end makerspaces is encouraging, but the focus should be on providing essential components, such as sensors. Students can learn only so much in makerspaces that have 3D printers but no 3D-printing filament, or printed circuit board fabrication and assembly but no sensor components.
Community groups and workshops focused on hardware projects can help address the accessibility challenges. These communities could tap into the global open-source hardware groups for education and research. Data Science Africa, a nonprofit that trains Africans in data science and machine learning, has run hardware sessions that could potentially be scaled to reach many more students. The emergence of research teams working on large-scale projects involving the development and deployment of hardware systems also presents opportunities for students and staff to access facilities and prototype quickly. Showcasing hardware projects from the continent and sharing lessons learned, successful or not, can inspire new projects. For example, at Makerere University—where I am now a computer science professor and the department chair—the AirQo project, which focuses on environmental sensing, provides access to key equipment, including 3D printers, soldering stations, and basic sensor boards and other electronic components.
Despite the persistent challenges of supply-chain delays, import duties, and limited local vendors that continue to hamper access to hardware across African universities, the continent’s engineering students and educators are finding creative ways to build, innovate, and learn. From my own journey from rural Uganda to pioneering SMS platforms and the emergence of makerspaces and research projects like AirQo, to collaborative communities that connect local innovators with global open-source networks, Africa is steadily closing the technology gap.
The question is no longer whether African students can compete in hardware innovation—it’s how quickly the world will recognize that some of tomorrow’s groundbreaking solutions are already being prototyped in labs from Kampala to Cape Town. They are being built by students like Oluwatosin Kolade, who learned to engineer solutions with whatever he could get his hands on. Imagine what they could do if they had access to the same resources I had in graduate school. African engineering potential is limitless, but to reach our full potential, we need access to technology that is more readily available in much of the world.
2025-08-20 21:00:03
The package containing the ArduCopter 2.8 board finally arrived from China, bearing the weight of our anticipation. I remember picking it up, the cardboard box weathered slightly from its journey. As I tore through the layers of tape, it felt like unwrapping a long-awaited gift. But as I lifted the ArduCopter 2.8 board out of the box, my heart sank. The board, which was to be the cornerstone of our project, looked worn out and old, with visible scuffs and bent pins. This was just one of a cascade of setbacks my team would face.
It all started when I was assigned a project in machine design at Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), located in the heart of Ilé-Ifẹ̀, an ancient Yoruba city in Osun State, in southwest Nigeria, where I am a mechanical engineering student entering my final year of a five-year program. OAU is one of Nigeria’s oldest and most prestigious universities, known for its beautiful campus and architecture. Some people I know refer to it as the “Stanford of Nigeria” because of the significant number of brilliant startups it has spun off. Despite its reputation, though, OAU—like every other federally owned institution in Nigeria—is underfunded and plagued by faculty strikes, leading to interruptions in academics. The lack of funding means students must pay for their undergraduate projects themselves, making the success of any project heavily dependent on the students’ financial capabilities.
Two perspectives on engineering education in Africa
Johnson I. Ejimanya is a one-man pony express. Walking the exhaust-fogged streets of Owerri, Nigeria, Ejimanya, the engineering dean of the Federal University of Technology, Owerri, carries with him a department’s worth of communications, some handwritten, others on disk. He’s delivering them to a man with a PC and an Internet connection who converts the missives into e-mails and downloads the responses. To Ejimanya, broadband means lugging a big bundle of printed e-mails back with him to the university, which despite being one of the country’s largest and most prestigious engineering schools, has no reliable means of connecting to the Internet.
I met Ejimanya when I visited Nigeria in 2003 to report on how the SAT-3/WASC, the first undersea fiber-optic cable to connect West Africa to the world, was being used. (The passage above is from my February 2004 IEEE Spectrum article “Surf Africa.”) Beyond the lack of computers and Internet access, I saw labs filled with obsolete technology from the 1960s. If students needed a computer or to get online, they went to an Internet cafe, their out-of-pocket costs a burden on them and their families.
So is the situation any better 20-plus years on? The short answer is yes. But as computer science professor Engineer Bainomugisha and IEEE student member Oluwatosin Kolade attest in the following pages, there’s still a long way to go.
Both men are engineers but at different stages of their academic journey: Bainomugisha went to college in the early 2000s and is now a computer science professor at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. Kolade is in his final semester as a mechanical engineering student at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ilé-Ifẹ̀, Nigeria. They describe the challenges they face and what they see as the path forward for a continent brimming with aspiring engineers but woefully short on the resources necessary for a robust education.
—Harry Goldstein
Dr. Oluwaseun K. Ajayi, an expert in computer-aided design (CAD), machine design, and mechanisms, gave us the freedom to choose our final project. I proposed a research project based on a paper titled “Advance Simulation Method for Wheel-Terrain Interactions of Space Rovers: A Case Study on the UAE Rashid Rover” by Ahmad Abubakar and coauthors. But due to the computational resources required, it was rejected. Dr. Ajayi instead proposed that my fellow students and I build a surveillance drone, as it aligned with his own research. Dr. Ajayi, a passionate and driven researcher, was motivated by the potential real-world applications of our project. His constant push for progress, while sometimes overwhelming, was rooted in his desire to see us produce meaningful work.
As my team finished scoping out the preliminary concepts of the drone in CAD designs, we were ready to contribute money toward implementing our idea. We conducted a cost analysis and decided to use a third-party vendor to help us order our components from China. We went this route due to shipping and customs issues we’d previously experienced. Taking the third-party route was supposed to solve the problem. Little did we suspect what was coming.
By the time we finalized our cost analysis and started to gather funds, the price of the components we needed had skyrocketed due to a sudden economic crisis and depreciation of the Nigerian naira by 35 percent against the U.S. dollar at the end of January 2024. This was the genesis of our problem.
Initially, we were a group of 12, but due to the high cost per person, Dr. Ajayi asked another group, led by Tonbra Suoware, to merge with mine. Tonbra’s team had been planning a robotic arm project until Dr. Ajayi merged our teams and instructed us to work on the drone, with the aim of exhibiting it at the National Space Research and Development Agency, in Abuja, Nigeria. The merger increased our group to 25 members, which helped with the individual financial burden but also meant that not everyone would actively participate in the project. Many just contributed their share of the money.
Tonbra and I drove the project forward.
With Dr. Ajayi’s consent, my teammates and I scrapped the “surveillance” part of the drone project and raised the money for developing just the drone, totaling approximately 350,000 naira (approximately US $249). We had to cut down costs, which meant straying away from the original specifications of some of the components, like the flight controller, battery, and power-distribution board. Otherwise, the cost would have been way more unbearable.
We were set to order the components from China on 5 February 2024. Unfortunately, it was a long holiday in China, we were told, so we wouldn’t get the components until March. This led to tense discussions with Dr. Ajayi, despite having briefed him about the situation. Why the pressure? Our school semester ends in March, and having components arrive in March would mean that the project would be long overdue by the time we finished it. At the same time, we students had a compulsory academic-industrial training at the end of the semester.
Oluwatosin Kolade, a mechanical engineering student at Nigeria’s Obafemi Awolowo University, says the drone project taught him the value of failure.Andrew Esiebo
But what choice did we have? We couldn’t back down from the project—that would have cost us our grade.
We got most of our components by mid-March, and immediately started working on the drone. We had the frame 3D-printed at a cost of 50 naira (approximately US $0.03) per gram for a 570-gram frame, for a total cost of 28,500 naira (roughly US $18).
Next, we turned to building the power-distribution system for the electrical components. Initially, we’d planned to use a power-distribution board to evenly distribute power from the battery to the speed controllers and the rotors. However, the board we originally ordered was no longer available. Forced to improvise, we used a Veroboard instead. We connected the battery in a configuration parallel to the speed controllers to ensure that each rotor received equal power. This improvisation did mean additional costs, as we had to rent soldering irons, hand drills, hot glue, cables, a digital multimeter, and other tools from an electronics hub in downtown Ilé-Ifẹ̀.
Everything was going smoothly until it was time to configure the flight controller—the ArduCopter 2.8 board—with the assistance of a software program called Mission Planner. We toiled daily, combing through YouTube videos, online forums, Stack Exchange, and other resources for guidance, all to no avail. We even downgraded the Mission Planner software a couple of times, only to discover that the board we’d waited for so patiently was obsolete. It was truly heartbreaking, but we couldn’t order another one because we didn’t have time to wait for it to arrive. Plus, getting another flight controller would’ve cost an additional sum—240,000 naira (about US $150) for a Pixhawk 2.4.8 flight controller—which we didn’t have.
We knew our drone would be half-baked without the flight controller. Still, given our semester-ending time constraint, we decided to proceed with the configuration of the transmitter and receiver. We made the final connections and tested the components without the flight controller. To ensure that the transmitter could control all four rotors simultaneously, we tested each rotor individually with each transmitter channel. The goal was to assign a single channel on the transmitter that would activate and synchronize all four rotors, allowing them to spin in unison during flight. This was crucial, because without proper synchronization, the drone would not be able to maintain a stable flight.
“This experience taught me invaluable lessons about resilience, teamwork, and the harsh realities of engineering projects done by students in Nigeria.”
After the final configuration and components testing, we set out to test our drone in its final form. But a few minutes into the testing, our battery failed. This failure meant the project had failed, and we were incredibly disappointed.
When we finally submitted our project to Dr. Ajayi, the deadline had passed. He told us to charge the battery so he could see the drone come alive, even though it couldn’t fly. But circumstances didn’t allow us to order a battery charger, and we were at a loss as to where to get help with the flight controller and battery. There are no tech hubs available for such things in Ilé-Ifẹ̀. We told Dr. Ajayi we couldn’t do as he’d asked and explained the situation to him. He finally allowed us to submit our work, and all team members received course credit.
This experience taught me invaluable lessons about resilience, teamwork, and the harsh realities of engineering projects done by students in Nigeria. It showed me that while technical knowledge is crucial, the ability to adapt and improvise when faced with unforeseen challenges is just as important. I also learned that failure, though disheartening, is not an ending but a stepping stone toward growth and improvement.
In my school, the demands on mechanical engineering students are exceptionally high. For instance, in a single semester, I was sometimes assigned up to four different major projects, each from a different professor. Alongside the drone project, I worked on two other substantial projects for other courses. The reality is that a student’s ability to score well in these projects is often heavily dependent on financial resources. We are constantly burdened with the costs of running numerous projects. The country’s ongoing economic challenges, including currency devaluation and inflation, only exacerbate this burden.
In essence, when the world, including graduate-school-admission committees and industry recruiters, evaluates transcripts from Nigerian engineering graduates, it’s crucial to recognize that a grade may not fully reflect a student’s capabilities in a given course. They can also reflect financial constraints, difficulties in sourcing equipment and materials, and the broader economic environment. This understanding must inform how transcripts are interpreted, as they tell a story not just of academic performance but also of perseverance in the face of significant challenges.
As I advance in my education, I plan to apply these lessons to future projects, knowing that perseverance and resourcefulness will be key to overcoming obstacles. The failed drone project has also given me a realistic glimpse into the working world, where unexpected setbacks and budget constraints are common. It has prepared me to approach my career with both a practical mindset and an understanding that success often comes from how well you manage difficulties, not just how well you execute plans.
2025-08-20 02:00:04
In the 1980s, people weren’t wearing head-mounted cameras, displays, or computers. Except for high school student Steve Mann, who regularly wore his homemade electronic computer vision system (seeing aid).
Back then, Mann attracted stares, questions, suspicion, and sometimes hostility. But it didn’t stop him from refining the technology he developed. It now underlies augmented-reality eyeglasses—including those by Google and Magic Leap—that are used in operating rooms and industrial settings such as factories and warehouses.
Employer:
University of Toronto
Job title:
Professor of electrical and computer engineering, computer science, and forestry
Member grade:
Fellow
Alma maters:
McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario; MIT
Although head-mounted computers haven’t reached smartphone-level ubiquity, when Mann wears XR (eXtended Reality, something he and Charles Wyckoff invented at MIT in 1991) gear these days as a professor of electrical and computer engineering, computer science, and forestry at the University of Toronto, he doesn’t turn as many heads as he used to.
In part because of his inventiveness and creativity, the IEEE Fellow was honored for his contributions to wearable computing and the concept of sousveillance—the practice of using personal recording devices to watch the watchers and invert traditional surveillance power structures—with this year’s IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Technology Award. Sponsored by Sony, the award was bestowed by the IEEE Consumer Technology Society at the Consumer Electronics Show held in January in Las Vegas.
Mann is regarded as the “father of wearable computing.” Asked what he thinks about the moniker, he says it’s less about the title and more about empowering people to see the world—and themselves—in new ways.
His research and systematic reimagining of how electronic devices can support and extend human abilities, especially vision, have yielded benefits for society. Among them are assisting the visually impaired with the ability to identify objects and enabling experts to remotely view what frontline workers see and then guide them from afar.
His IEEE award came one month after he received the Lifeboat Foundation’s Guardian Award, given to a scientist or public figure “who has warned of a future fraught with dangers and encouraged measures to prevent them.” The foundation is a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization dedicated to encouraging scientific advancements while helping humanity survive existential risks and possible misuse of increasingly powerful technologies including genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robotics/AI.
It stands to reason that Mann would become a leading tinkerer. His earliest memories are of welding with his grandfather and knitting with his grandmother—unusual hobbies for a typical 4-year-old, though not in Mann’s family. His father, who worked for a men’s clothing company, supplemented his income by buying and renovating houses, long before the concept of flipping houses became widespread.
“We were always living in a house under construction,” Mann recalls. “I used to help my dad fix things when I was 4 or 5—hammer in my hand—normal stuff.” His grandfather, a refrigeration engineer, taught him how to weld. By age 6, he was wiring and building homemade radios. By the time he was 8, he had started a neighborhood repair business, fixing televisions and radios.
“In a sense, preschool for me was learning engineering and science,” Mann says with a laugh. “I grew up putting together wood, metal, or fabric. I knew how to make things at a very young age.”
When Mann was 12 years old, his father brought home a broken oscillograph (an early version of the oscilloscope, used to display variations in voltage or current as visual waveforms). It turned out to be a defining moment in his life. Too impatient to accept that the waveform dot on the machine’s display moved only up and down instead of both vertically and horizontally, Mann invented a way to push its image through physical space.
He placed the oscillograph—which he now keeps on a shelf in his laboratory—on a board mounted on roller skate wheels. He connected the device to a police radar and rolled it back and forth. When he realized the machine’s motion, combined with the dot’s vertical movement, created visible waveforms of the radar’s signals, as a function of space rather than time, he unknowingly made a revolutionary discovery.
Later he would describe that merging of physical and virtual worlds as “extended reality”—a concept that underlies today’s AR and XR technologies. It wouldn’t be the last time Mann’s curiosity turned a problem into an opportunity.
Decades later, on the main floor of his Toronto home, he co-founded InteraXon, the Toronto-based company behind the Muse brain-sensing headband, used to help people manage sleep, stress, and mental health.
Mann shares legendary 1970s Xerox PARC researcher Alan Kay’s belief that “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” Mann, however, adds: “Sometimes you invent it by simply refusing to accept the limitations of the present.”
In high school, Mann won several math competitions designed to challenge students at university level. In 1982 he enrolled in McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario, to pursue a degree in engineering physics (an interdisciplinary program that combines physics, mathematics, and engineering principles). As an undergraduate, Mann was already experimenting with early prototypes of wearable computers—head-mounted displays, body-worn cameras, and portable computing systems that predated mainstream mobile tech by decades.
Mann [far right] sits alongside fellow MIT Media Lab graduate students, modeling the wearable computers or smart clothes they were developing as part of their Ph.D. research. Pam Berry/The Boston Globe/Getty Images
He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1986. He continued his studies at McMaster to earn a second bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1989, then a master’s degree in engineering in 1991.
He then enrolled in a doctoral program at MIT, where he joined its renowned Media Lab, a hotbed for unconventional research blending technology, design, and the human experience. He formalized and expanded his ideas around wearable computing, wearable computer vision systems, and wearable AI. He also published some of the earliest academic papers that described the concept of sousveillance.
He completed his Ph.D. in media arts and sciences in 1997.
Mann’s doctoral research contributed foundational concepts and hardware that influenced future smart glasses and devices for life logging, the practice of creating a digital record of one’s daily life. He also helped blaze a trail for the fields of augmented reality and ubiquitous computing.
After completing his Ph.D., Mann returned to Canada and took a position at the University of Toronto as a professor of electrical and computer engineering in 1998. He says he is equally as fascinated by how technology interacts with the natural world as he is by how to remove barriers between the physical world and virtual world.
His interests connect to what he calls “vironmentalism,” which regards technology as a boundary between our environment and our “vironment” (ourselves). This gives rise to his vision of “mersive” technologies that link humans not just to each other but also to the environment around them.
“Go beyond [what’s covered at] school. Define yourself by what you love so much you’d do it [even if no teachers or managers were demanding it]. AI can replace a walking encyclopedia. It can’t replace passion.”
“It’s advancing technology for humanity and Earth,” he says, riffing on IEEE’s mission statement. His guiding principle also explains his cross-appointment in the University of Toronto’s forestry department (now part of the Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design)—an unusual entry on an electrical and computer engineering professor’s CV.
Prior to his groundbreaking doctoral work at MIT, Mann had already joined IEEE in 1988. He credits the organization with connecting him to pioneers like Simon Haykin, the radar visionary he met at McMaster while he was in high school. Haykin pushed him to dream big, he says.
Mann has been active in the IEEE Computer and IEEE Consumer Technology societies. He has served as an organizer, session chair, and program committee member for IEEE conferences related to wearable computing and pervasive sensing.
In 1997 he helped found the International Symposium on Wearable Computers, and numerous other wearable computing symposia, conferences, and events.
He has given keynote talks and presented papers on topics including sousveillance, ubiquitous computing, and other humanistic aspects of technology at the IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society and the IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications.
His contributions include influential papers in IEEE journals, especially various IEEE Transactions and Computer Society magazines.
Probably his most well-known paper is “Wearable Computing.” Published in Computer magazine in October 1997, the seminal work outlined the structure and vision for wearable computing as a formal research field. He also contributed articles on sousveillance—exploring the intersection of technology, ethics, and human rights—in IEEE Technology and Society Magazine.
He has collaborated with other IEEE members to develop frameworks for wearable computing standards, particularly around human-computer interfaces and privacy considerations.
Mann continues to teach, run his lab, and test new frontiers of wearable devices, smart clothing, and immersive environments. He’s still driven, he says, by the same forces that powered his backyard experiments as a child: curiosity and passion.
For students who hope to follow in his footsteps, Mann’s advice is simple: “Go beyond [what’s covered at] school. Don’t define yourself by the classes you took or the jobs you had. Define yourself by what you love so much you’d do it “even if no teachers or managers were demanding it”. He adds that, “AI can replace a walking encyclopedia. It can’t replace passion.”
Mann says he has no plans to retire. If anything, he says, his most productive years are yet to come.
“I feel like I’m a late bloomer,” he says, chuckling at the irony. “I was fixing radios when I was 8, but my best work? That’s going to happen between 65 and 85.”