Robotics

Battery-free robots use origami to change shape in mid-air

Researchers at the University of Washington have developed small robotic devices that can change how they move through the air by "snapping" into a folded position during their descent. The team published these results in ...

Software

Software creates entirely new views from existing video

Filmmakers may soon be able to stabilize shaky video, change viewpoints and create freeze-frame, zoom and slow-motion effects—without shooting any new footage—thanks to an algorithm developed by researchers at Cornell ...

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Pattern

A pattern, from the French patron, is a type of theme of recurring events or objects, sometimes referred to as elements of a set of objects.

These elements repeat in a predictable manner. It can be a template or model which can be used to generate things or parts of a thing, especially if the things that are created have enough in common for the underlying pattern to be inferred, in which case the things are said to exhibit the unique pattern.

The most basic patterns, called Tessellations, are based on repetition and periodicity. A single template, tile, or cell, is combined with duplicates without change or modification. For example, simple harmonic oscillators produce repeated patterns of movement.

Other patterns, such as Penrose tiling and Pongal or Kolam patterns from India, use symmetry which is a form of finite repetition, instead of translation which can repeat to infinity. Fractal patterns also use magnification or scaling giving an effect known as self-similarity or scale invariance. Some plants, like Ferns, even generate a pattern using an affine transformation which combines translation, scaling, rotation and reflection.

Pattern matching is the act of checking for the presence of the constituents of a pattern, whereas the detecting for underlying patterns is referred to as pattern recognition. The question of how a pattern emerges is accomplished through the work of the scientific field of pattern formation.

Pattern recognition is more complex when templates are used to generate variants. For example, in English, sentences often follow the "N-VP" (noun - verb phrase) pattern, but some knowledge of the English language is required to detect the pattern. Computer science, ethology, and psychology are fields which study patterns.

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