Technical Articles

MATLAB and Simulink in the World: Transformative Technology


Restoring sight and voice, connecting cities with a hyperloop transportation system, generating electricity from thin air—engineers at emerging companies are using MATLAB® and Simulink® to develop pioneering solutions and break boundaries.

PRECEYES Surgical System

Surgery performed inside the eye demands almost superhuman precision and stability. A surgeon at John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, removed a retinal membrane one hundredth of a millimeter thick using the PRECEYES Surgical System, an inverted joystick-based device that automatically moves the tool tip in response to the surgeon’s movements.


VocaliD

“We wouldn’t dream of fitting a little girl with the prosthetic limb of a grown man—so why, then, the same prosthetic voice?”

VocaliD is developing the first-ever personalized digital voices, enabling people who rely on synthetic speech for communication to sound like themselves. A personalized voice is a blend of the recipient’s vocalization and recordings of a matched speaker from VocaliD’s Human Voicebank, a repository of 26,000 contributors worldwide. The resulting BeSpoke™ voice can be downloaded for use on text-to-speech devices and applications across all platforms.


LauncherOne

“There are a lot more runways in the world than there are launch pads. Our downrange can be anywhere we point the aircraft.”

LauncherOne is Virgin Orbit’s two-stage launch vehicle for delivering small satellites into low earth orbit. To reduce costs and increase launch location flexibility, LauncherOne is designed to be air-dropped from a 747-400 carrier aircraft in flight.


From City to City at the Speed of Sound

Hardt Hyperloop

“Imagine a world where distance just doesn’t matter anymore—a system that’s faster than airplanes, more convenient than trains, and the best alternative for the environment. That’s the world we’re making into a reality, and it’s called the hyperloop.”

Hardt Hyperloop is developing the first high-speed hyperloop test facility in the world in the Dutch province of Flevoland.  The hyperloop consists of small, lightweight vehicles travelling through a tube with virtually no air resistance, allowing them to travel over huge distances very fast, with minimal energy consumption.


Kitenergy

"Mobile high-altitude wind energy generators can provide cheap renewable energy to everyone who needs it.”

Kitenergy converts high-altitude wind energy into electricity by exploiting the flight of automatically controlled kites tethered 200–800 meters above the ground. Electricity is generated at ground level by converting the traction forces acting on the tethers into mechanical and electrical power, using rotating mechanisms and electrical generators.

Published 2018