Technology and the built world

Ronald Smelt

Ronald Smelt, known as Roy Smelt, was an Anglo-American aeronautical engineer who was chief scientist of Lockheed and worked with Frank Whittle on the first jet flight.

Ronald V. Schmidt (1944–2022) was an American electrical engineer known for research on acoustic surface waves and integrated optics at Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, and for co-founding SynOptics Communications.

Ronald W. Schafer

Ronald W. Schafer (born 1938) is an American electrical engineer known for foundational work in digital signal processing and for co-authoring the canonical DSP textbooks with Alan V. Oppenheim.

Ronan Point

Ronan Point was a 22-storey tower block of flats in Canning Town, London, built of prefabricated concrete panels. A 1968 gas explosion collapsed its corner, killing five, and prompted new building-code rules against progressive collapse.

Roncador Field

Roncador Field is a giant deepwater, post-salt oil and gas field in the Campos Basin off Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, discovered in 1996 and operated by Petrobras with Equinor.

Rondo Heat Battery

The Rondo Heat Battery is an electric thermal energy storage system by Rondo Energy of Alameda, California, storing renewable electricity in refractory brick as high-temperature industrial heat.

Rong Xu

Rong Xu is a Singapore-based chemical engineer and professor at Nanyang Technological University who works on photocatalysis and electrocatalysis, converting solar energy to fuels through water splitting and carbon dioxide reduction.

Rong-Yu Wan

Rong-Yu Wan (1932–2009) was a Chinese metallurgist at Newmont Mining, elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2000 for her work on refractory gold ores.

Rongke Power

Rongke Power, formally Dalian Rongke Power Co., Ltd., is a Chinese vanadium redox flow battery manufacturer founded in Dalian in 2008 by the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics.

Rongke Power (大连融科储能集团股份有限公司) (Dalian Rongke Storage Battery)

Rongke Power, also known as Dalian Rongke Storage Battery, is a Chinese manufacturer of vanadium redox flow battery storage systems, founded in Dalian in 2008.

Rongsheng Roger Ruan

Rongsheng Roger Ruan is a professor at the University of Minnesota who directs the Center for Biorefining and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2025.

Rongtong Gaoke (融通高科)

Rongtong Gaoke (融通高科) is a Chinese manufacturer of lithium iron phosphate battery cathode materials, founded by He Zhonglin in 2016 in Daye, Hubei, and supplying CATL and BYD.

Ronitt Rubinfeld

Ronitt Rubinfeld is an American computer scientist at MIT, best known for property testing and sublinear-time algorithms, studying what can be learned from small data samples.

Roof

A roof is the construction covering the upper part of a building to exclude rain, snow, and sun, combining structure, weatherproofing, and, increasingly, energy and climate functions.

Roof garden

A roof garden, or rooftop garden, is a garden built on a building's roof, either in containers or as an engineered green roof that reduces urban stormwater runoff.

Roof shingle

A roof shingle, also called a roofing shingle, is a thin piece of wood, asphalt, slate, metal, or concrete laid in overlapping rows to shed rainwater.

Roofline model

The roofline model is a visual performance model bounding a kernel's attainable performance from its arithmetic intensity and the hardware's peak compute and memory speed.

Rooftop solar power

Rooftop solar power is electricity generated by photovoltaic panels mounted on residential, commercial, and industrial building roofs, typically grid-connected so buildings draw power at night and export surpluses.

Rooikat

The Rooikat is a South African 8x8 wheeled armored fighting vehicle, named after the Afrikaans word for the caracal, serving as the army's reconnaissance vehicle since 1989.

Room 641A

Room 641A, or SG3 Secure Room, was a secure room in AT&T's San Francisco facility where whistleblower Mark Klein said the NSA copied internet traffic, revealed in 2006.

Room and pillar mining

Room and pillar mining is an underground coal mining method in which pillars of coal are left standing to support the roof, recovering about 40 to 60% of the seam.

Room for the River (Netherlands)

Room for the River (Ruimte voor de Rivier) is a Dutch flood-protection program that gives rivers more space rather than raising dikes, running from 2006 to 2019.

Roomba

Roomba, also known as the iRobot Roomba, is a series of autonomous robotic vacuum cleaners made by iRobot, first sold in September 2002 and credited with creating the robot vacuum category.

Roombots

Roombots is a self-reconfiguring modular robotic system developed at EPFL's BioRobotics Laboratory in Lausanne, Switzerland, intended as building blocks for furniture that moves and reconfigures itself.

Rooppur nuclear power plant

The Rooppur nuclear power plant (রূপপুর পারমাণবিক বিদ্যুৎকেন্দ্র) is Bangladesh's first nuclear power plant, under construction at Rooppur in Ishwardi with two Russian-built 1,200 MW reactors totaling 2,400 MW.

Roosevelt Highway (auto trail)

The Roosevelt Highway was the name of several 1910s and 1920s auto trails honoring Theodore Roosevelt, the best known running between Portland, Maine, and Portland, Oregon.

Roosevelt Island Tramway

The Roosevelt Island Tramway is an aerial tramway linking Roosevelt Island to Manhattan across the East River. Opened in 1976 as a temporary subway substitute, it became a permanent transit link.

Root cause analysis

Root cause analysis (RCA) is a structured method for finding the root causes of an undesired outcome, used in aviation, healthcare, manufacturing, and software engineering.

Root cellar

A root cellar is an underground or insulated room that uses the ground's cool, stable temperature and humidity to store vegetables and fruits without electricity.