Lighting

Articles : Robotics, Automation & Control

Smart Actuators Deliver on the Promise of Industry 4.0

As Industry 4.0 initiatives bring more and more industrial axes of motion into the realm of automation, the need for cost-effective control across them grows as well. Advances in...

Application Briefs : Medical

Imaging Innovation for Spinal Care

Motion capture (Mocap) is a technique used in the film industry to digitally track a human actor's movements and precisely transfer those motions to an animated figure. But it has other applications as...

Briefs : Lighting

Two-Dimensional Semiconductor Materials Created Using Artificial “Superlattices”

One current method to build a semiconductor superlattice — materials comprised of alternating layers of ultra-thin, two-dimensional sheets only one or a...

Briefs : Materials

Generating Light-Induced Electrical Current in Atomically Thin Nanomaterials

When hit with light, semiconductors (materials that have an electrical resistance in between that of metals and insulators) generate an electric current....

Articles : Photonics/Optics

NASA at 60: From Space to Earth

The benefits of NASA's space exploration efforts are not limited to the cosmos. NASA technologies provide innovative solutions for people around the world. NASA missions have generated thousands of spinoffs...

Briefs : Electronics & Computers

“Soft Hardware” Cloth Has Built-In Electronic Devices

Optical fibers have been traditionally produced by making a cylindrical object called a preform — essentially, a scaled-up model of the fiber — and then heating it. Softened...

Briefs : Materials

Efficient Semiconductor Material for Thermal Management

Computer processors have continued to shrink down to nanometer sizes where there can be billions of transistors on a single chip. This phenomenon is described under Moore's Law, which...

Blog : Photonics/Optics

Functional Fabric Brings Semiconductors Directly to the Fiber

Instead of attaching semiconductors to fabric, an MIT team has found a way to add the technology right into the fiber themselves.

Articles : Test & Measurement

Machine Vision Can Do More Than You Think

The ability to automatically extract information from digital images opens many doors for manufacturers striving to cut costs, improve quality, and streamline their processes overall. The primary...

Briefs : Photonics/Optics

Positional Sensor Measures Rotational and Lateral Displacements

Positional sensors have applications where a very accurate measurement of position is needed over a limited range. One example of such an application is in manipulation of a...

Products : Test & Measurement

New Products: July 2018 Photonics & Imaging Technology

Trilinear Line Scan Cameras

Teledyne e2v (Milpitas, CA) has announced its next generation of line scan cameras — the high-resolution ELiiXA+ trilinear color range. These new 8k pixel...

Application Briefs : Lighting

Military Optics Technology

The demand for innovative solutions to enhance the safety of military personnel is continually on the rise. This includes the need to improve the performance of military vehicles and aircraft, in terms of both...

Articles : Lighting

Taking It to the Streets: Designing Streetlamp Optical Components

The task of creating a streetlamp optical system has changed over the last 20 years and due to this change, so has optical design software. Let’s compare the task of...

Application Briefs : Sensors/Data Acquisition

Bringing Multispectral Imaging to Industrial Applications

A mere 20 years ago, machine vision system designers did all they could to avoid color imaging applications due to higher costs and greater system and software complexity. But as...

Briefs : Sensors/Data Acquisition

See Objects Hidden Around Corners

A driverless car is making its way through a winding neighborhood street, about to make a sharp turn onto a road where a child’s ball has just rolled. Although no person in the car can see that ball, the...

Application Briefs : Software

Guiding the Way in Automotive Plants

Vision-guided robotics commonly used in today's automotive plants enables robots to “see” the object they are working on so they can perform the required activity accurately on/to an object that is...

Articles : Photonics/Optics

Paired Sleep Tracker and Light Therapy Tools Retrain Circadian Rhythms

Spinoff is NASA’s annual publication featuring successfully commercialized NASA technology. This commercialization has contributed to the development of products and...

Articles : Lighting

How Sophisticated Wearable Sensors are Changing Healthcare

In the traditional model of healthcare, a patient would visit a doctor regularly for checkups or for evaluations when there’s an ailment. This model, however, isn’t ideal for...

Briefs : Sensors/Data Acquisition

Compact Science Experiment Module

Crew time on the International Space Station (ISS) is extremely limited for any operations on science payloads. Autonomous science experiments in small, self-contained, cubical payloads are highly desirable...

Application Briefs : Lighting

Direct AC LED Engines

As the lighting industry continues to mature, vendors continue to pursue inexpensive lighting solutions that offer universal compatibility and are easy to install. For OEMs and manufacturers, LEDs have proven to be a...

Articles : Test & Measurement

Products of Tomorrow: May 2018

This column presents technologies that have applications in commercial areas, possibly creating the products of tomorrow. To learn more about each technology, see the contact information provided for that...

Products : Lighting

New Products: May 2018 Photonics & Imaging Technology

Portable Laser Scanner

Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence (North Kingstown, RI) has announced the Leica Absolute Scanner LAS-XL, a new ultralarge scale portable laser scanner. Designed...

Products : Electronics & Computers

New on the Market: April 2018

Polarization Camera

Lucid Vision Labs, Richmond, BC, Canada, announced the 5-megapixel Phoenix polarization camera that can be used to detect stress or defects in manufacturing of materials such as plastic,...

Blog : Semiconductors & ICs

Wobbly ‘HOIP’ Semiconductor Has Researchers in Excited State

Physical chemists at the Georgia Institute of Technology discovered an emerging class of semiconductors with some unexpected moves.

INSIDER : Lighting Technology

New Phosphor Material Improves LED Color Quality

A team led by engineers at the University of California San Diego has used data mining and computational tools to discover a new phosphor material for white LEDs that is inexpensive and...

Products : Photonics/Optics

New Products: January 2018 Photonics & Imaging Technology

High-Speed Cameras

iX Cameras (Woburn, MA and Rochford, UK) has added a new, value-priced camera to the premium ultra-high-speed i-SPEED 7 Series line. The new i-SPEED 713...

Articles : Manufacturing & Prototyping

Innovators Recognized for "Creating the Future" 2017

The Create the Future Design Contest has helped stimulate and reward engineering innovation over the past 16 years, drawing more than 14,000 product designs from engineers, students, and...

Articles : Electronics & Computers

Products of Tomorrow: October 2017

This column presents technologies that have applications in commercial areas, possibly creating the products of tomorrow. To learn more about each technology, see the contact information provided for that...

Briefs : Imaging

Machine Vision System

A number of instruments have been built to obtain range images — a two-dimensional array of numbers that gives the depth of a scene along many directions from a central point in the instrument. Instead of measuring...