Researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden have completed work on an EU project aimed at enabling robots to cooperate with one another on complex jobs, by using body language. Dimos Dimarogonas, an associate professor at KTH and project coordinator for RECONFIG, says the research project has developed protocols that enable robots to ask for help from each other and to recognise when other robots need assistance - and change t...

Scientists at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm now report that they have unlocked one major barrier to exploiting this renewable energy source. Because the best-performing catalysts for electrochemical oxidation, or "water splitting", are expensive precious metals, the research team led by KTH Professor Licheng Sun is one of many worldwide searching for cheaper alternatives. Sun had earlier developed molecular catalysts for water ox...

Working with automotive manufacturer Scania, researchers from KTH Royal Institute of Technology have been testing semi trucks equipped with a system that converts exhaust heat into power — through a process called thermoelectric generation (TEG). The voltage produced by the system can power the truck and reduce the strain on the engine, explains researcher Arash Risseh.

A self-driving truck under development by Scania and KTH researchers has tested successfully at speeds of up to 90 km/h. According to the research lead at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, the successful tests are aimed at implementing self-driving Scania trucks in mining operations within a year or two. "We have come a long way with the work and have already proven with a real truck that the task is possible," says Bo Wahlberg, profes...

A positioning system adapted for use in fire rescue operations will soon be tested on senior citizens in Sweden as a way to spot signs of early stage Parkinson's disease and other mobility problems. Inside the heel of a boot, advanced sensors designed at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm make it possible for emergency operations commanders to follow smoke divers' exact movements in any building — even 25 metres below groun...

Windows and solar panels in the future could be made from one of the best—and cheapest—construction materials known: wood. Researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology have developed a transparent wood material that's suitable for mass production. Lars Berglund, a professor at Wallenberg Wood Science Center at KTH, says that while optically transparent wood has been developed for microscopic samples in the study of wood anatomy, t...

The technique biomimetics aims to solve problems and create new products by mimicking the way nature and animals do things. And like the animals themselves, examples of biomimetics continue to multiply. By studying termite mounds and their ventilation system, it has been possible to imitate them and design large buildings without air conditioning. Bombardier beetles spray a hot, noxious chemical when frightened, providing an idea for spray b...

By 2017, English, Swedish and Arabic speakers will find that Wikipedia is talking their language—literally. The online free encyclopedia is collaborating with Sweden's KTH Royal Institute of Technology to develop the world's first crowdsourced speech synthesis platform. The platform will be optimised for Wikipedia but freely available as open source, and readily usable by any site that uses the MediaWiki software on which Wikimedia is based...

Researchers at KTH have developed a new polymer suited for photostructuring, a technique for creating micro-scale shapes. The discovery opens new possibilities for medical diagnostics, biophotonics and 3D printing. The so-called off-stoichiometry thiol-enes (OSTE) polymer was developed at KTH specifically to meet the need for a material suitable for both experimental prototyping and large-scale manufacturing of labs-on-a-chip or miniaturised bioa...

Paper-based diagnostics enable rapid medical test results at minimal cost, and now they can get even better. A synthetic paper developed by Swedish researchers could enable simultaneous screenings for multiple conditions, with more reliable results. Microscopic image of the synthetic paper developed at KTH. Developed at KTH, the synthetic paper differs significantly from the most predominant paper diagnostics used today, such as pregnancy tests.

Swedish researchers have just produced the world's first model car with a roof and battery made from wood-based carbon fibre. Although it's built on the scale of a toy, the prototype vehicle represents a giant step towards realising a vision of new lightweight materials from the forest, one of the benefits of a so-called bioeconomy. The demo is a joint project of KTH Royal Institute of Technology, the Swedish Innventia and Swerea, a research...

Nanogaps could enable new types of microprocessors and make a whole range of biosensors possible, and now researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology have published a scalable method using nanocracks for creating nanogaps that are only a few atom layers wide. Valentin Dubois, a researcher at KTH's Department of Micro and Nanosystems, says the new method improves on established ways to achieve gaps in conductive materials — in this...

Maybe soon we can say goodbye to polystyrene, the petroleum-based material that is used to make Styrofoam. In what looks like an ordinary bicycle helmet, Swedish designers have replaced Styrofoam with a new shock-absorbing material made with renewable and biodegradable wood-based material.

The latest episode of Crosstalks “Imagining the possible” talked about how science inspires fiction and vice versa. The submarine, the helicopter and the atomic power are all inventions that were in some way inspired by the fictional works of authors like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.

One of the biggest European investments in ocean energy, the first commercial scale underwater “kite” power plant is being built off the coast of Holyhead, Wales. "Tidal energy is sort of an underwater version of wind energy", explains Stefan Björklund, an assistant professor in machine design at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.