Traditional methods for monitoring a building's structural health, particularly its natural frequencies and damping ratios, typically rely on expensive, permanently installed sensor systems, which are not widely accessible. This innovation, developed by UC Berkeley researchers, provides a highly scalable and cost-effective method for Monitoring Building Structural Health using Smartphones and Ambient Vibrations. The method leverages smartphones equipped with the MyShake earthquake early warning application to measure the ambient vibrations of a building. By analyzing these vibrations, the application can accurately determine key structural health parameters, namely the building's natural frequencies and damping ratios. This technique transforms readily available personal devices into powerful structural monitoring tools, offering a vastly more accessible and lower-cost solution than existing dedicated sensor networks.

Traditional offshore energy systems are stationary and rely on expensive underwater cabling to deliver power. UC Berkeley researchers have developed a more flexible solution called PowerCab, a mobile energy harvesting and delivery platform. The system features a specialized hull equipped with a sail for wind-driven propulsion and an autonomous steering system. PowerCab integrates multiple energy generation devices—which can harness power from the wind, waves, or sun—and stores that energy in an onboard storage device. A sophisticated control system uses environmental sensors to navigate the vessel toward optimal harvesting conditions or to transport stored power to coastal regions and offshore installations that need it most.

Optical atomic clocks have taken a giant leap in recent years, with several experiments reaching uncertainties at the 10−18 level. The development of synchronized clock networks and transportable clocks that operate in extreme and distant environments would allow clocks based on different atomic standards or placed in separate locations to be compared. Such networks would enable relativistic geodesy, tests of fundamental physics, dark matter searches, and more. However, the leading neutral-atom optical clocks operate on wavelengths of 698 nm (Sr) and 578 nm (Yb). Light at these wavelengths is strongly attenuated in optical fibers, posing a challenge to long-distance time transfer. Those wavelengths are also inconvenient for constructing the ultrastable lasers that are an essential component of optical clocks. To address this problem, UC Berkeley researchers have developed a new, laser-cooled neutral atom optical atomic clock that operates in the telecommunication wavelength band. The leveraged atomic transitions are narrow and exhibit much smaller black body radiation shifts than those in alkaline earth atoms, as well as small quadratic Zeeman shifts. Furthermore, the transition wavelengths are in the low-loss S, C, and L-bands of fiber-optic telecommunication standards, allowing the clocks to be integrated with robust laser technology and optical amplifiers. Additionally, the researchers have identified magic trapping wavelengths via extensive studies and have proposed approaches to overcome magnetic dipole-dipole interactions. Together, these features support the development of fiber-linked terrestrial clock networks over continental distances.

The field of autonomous transportation is rapidly evolving to operate in diverse settings and conditions. However, as the number of autonomous vehicles on the road increases the complexity of the computations needed to safely operate all of the autonomous vehicles grows rapidly. across multiple vehicles, this creates a very large volume of computations that must be performed very quickly (e.g., in real or near-real time).   Thus, treating each autonomous vehicle as an independent entity may result in inefficient use of computing resources, as many redundant data collections and computations may be performed (e.g., two vehicles in close proximity may be performing computations related to the same detected object). To address this issue, researches at UC Berkeley proposed algorithms for the management and exchange of shared information across nearby and distant vehicles.According to the proposed arrangement, autonomous vehicles may share data collected by their respective sensor systems with other autonomous vehicles and adjust their operations accordingly in a manner that is more computationally efficient. This can not only increase safety but at the same time reduce computational load required by each individual vehicle.

The field of autonomous transportation is rapidly evolving to operate in diverse settings and conditions.  Critical to the performance of autonomous vehicles is the ability to detect other objects in the autonomous vehicle’s vicinity and adjust accordingly. To do so, many autonomous vehicles utilize a variety of sensors, including sonar. Although these sensor systems have been shown to improve the safety of autonomous vehicles by reducing collisions, the sensor systems tend to be computationally inefficient.  For instance, the sensor systems may generate large volumes of data that must be processed quickly (e.g., in real or near-real time).  The performance of excessive computations may delay the identification and deployment of necessary resources and actions and/or increase the cost of hardware on the vehicle making it less financially appealing to the consumer. Researches at UC Berkeley proposed algorithms for temporally and spectrally adaptive sonar systems for autonomous vehicles. These allow utilization of existing sonar system in an adaptive manner and in interface with existence hardware/software employed on autonomous vehicles. 

There are several emerging applications for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) where the agility and accurate control of location and/or orientation is critical. In the presence of random ocean currents and waves, conventional AUV systems need to use a combination of their thrusters to generate an appropriate force/torque and cancel the external disturbance to maintain the desired attitude or position. This is a relatively slow response since it requires accelerating and pushing water around the vehicle body. Thus, existing AUVs have disadvantages: (i) accurate and agile orientation and position control/stabilization is challenging; (ii) since thrusters are operational during reorientation maneuvers, a substantial amount of power is consumed to pump the bulk fluid, wasting the precious power storage of the vehicle and thus reducing its operational time; and (iii) drag forces and torques exerted on the thrusters significantly affect the efficiency of reorientation maneuvers.   UC Berkeley researchers have designed a new device for fast stabilization and control of an underwater robotic vehicle. In this architecture, the attitude maneuvers are performed using reaction torques that the body of the vehicle gains from a central inertial system.   

This technology combines air layer frictional drag reduction (ALDR) with super hydrophobic surfaces (SHS) to achieve frictional drag reduction of ALDR with significantly reduced gas flux. Thus, enabling increased net energy savings. The stable air layer is achieved with lesser gas flux when utilizing a SHS.Periodic air layers may replenish SHS, enabling drag reduction with reduced energy cost. Combinations of SHS and regular or other non-SHS surface may be used to control spreading of gas, thus facilitating formation of ALDR using discrete gas injection points better than previously achievable. Such surface variations could also be used to preferentially guide gas towards or away from propulsion, depending on desired outcome. By controlling ALDR regionally or globally on a surface, with or without SHS, this technology modifies flow around a hull. This mediates forces on partially or fully submerged objects, enabling control of flow patterns, resistance, steering, and/or dynamics.

Trillions of sensors are envisioned to achieve the potential benefits of the internet of things.  Realizing this potential requires wireless sensors with low power requirements such that there might never be a need to replace a sensor’s power supply (e.g. battery) over the lifetime of that device.  The battery lifetime of wireless communications devices is often governed by power consumption used for transmitting, and therefore transmit power amplifiers used in these devises are important to their commercial success.  The efficiencies of these power amplifiers are set by the capabilities of the semiconductor transistor devices that drive them.  To achieve improved efficiencies, researchers at UC Berkeley have developed a novel method and structure for realizing a zero-quiescent power trigger sensor and transceiver based on a micromechanical resonant switch.  This sensor/transceiver is unique in its use of a resonant switch (“resoswitch”) to receive an input, amplify it, and finally deliver power to a load.  This novel technology also greatly improves short-range communication applications, like Bluetooth.  For example, with this technology, interference between Bluetooth devices would be eliminated.  Also, Miracast would work, despite the presence of interfering Bluetooth signals.

There are many applications that require the storage of a high density of gas molecules. The driving range of vehicles powered by natural gas or hydrogen, for instance, is determined by the maximum density of gas that can be stored inside a fuel tank and delivered to the engine or fuel cell. In certain situations, it is desirable to lower the pressure or raise the temperature needed to store a given amount of gas through the use of an adsorbent. Developments in next-generation adsorbents, such as metal-organic frameworks and activated carbons, have shown certain weaknesses in terms of the amount of gas that can be delivered when an application has a minimum desorption pressure greater than zero and when a significant amount of heat is released during adsorption or cooling occurs during desorption. To help solve these problems, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have developed a next generation of materials using novel porous metal-organic frameworks that demonstrate unprecedented deliverable gas capacities. These engineered adsorbents maximize the amount of gas delivered during each adsorption/desorption cycle. This shows promise in developing next generation gas storage materials for applications with a wide range of operating conditions.

Ammonia is used in many industrial and commercial applications, for example in the manufacture of fertilizers and cleaners.  However, ammonia is toxic at high concentrations and, therefore, safe storage and transportation of ammonia is required. In addition, trace amounts of ammonia in the atmosphere contaminate and interfere with certain industrial processes, such as semiconductor fabrication, which requires ultra-pure air. Proper ammonia management includes the adsorption of the gas under each of these pressure regimes: high-pressure adsorption for safe storage and transportation and low-pressure adsorption for the removal of trace contaminants from the ambient air. Current methods of adsorption include simple salts, such as MgCl2, but these are not efficient for low-pressure adsorption and furthermore their ammonia cycle is inefficient, requiring significant heat exchange and large changes in volume. Investigators at UC Berkeley have developed a novel polymer for ammonia adsorption that uses acidic materials placed in a spatial arrangement that allows for cooperative adsorption. This not only increases the efficiency of adsorption but also is effective at both high-pressure and low-pressure ammonia adsorption, resulting in multiple applications of the technology.