Researchers at Northwestern University and Israel’s Tel Aviv University have overcome a major barrier to achieving a low-cost solution for advanced robotic touch. The authors argue that the problem that has been lurking in the margins of many papers about touch sensors lies in the robotic skin itself.

In the study, inexpensive silicon rubber composites used to make skin were observed to host an insulating layer on the top and bottom surfaces, which prevented direct electrical contact between the sensing polymer and the monitoring surface electrodes, making accurate and repeatable measurements virtually impossible.

With the error eliminated, cheap robotic skins could allow robots to mimic human touch, allowing them to sense an object’s curves and edges, which is necessary to properly grasp it.

Oregon State University College of Engineering researchers have developed a more efficient chip as an antidote to the vast amounts of electricity consumed by large-language-model artificial intelligence applications like Gemini and GPT-4.

“We have designed and fabricated a new chip that consumes half the energy compared to traditional designs,” said doctoral student Ramin Javadi, who, along with Tejasvi Anand, associate professor of electrical engineering, presented the technology at the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference in Boston.

“The problem is that the energy required to transmit a single bit is not being reduced at the same rate as the data rate demand is increasing,” said Anand, who directs the Mixed Signal Circuits and Systems Lab at OSU. “That’s what is causing data centers to use so much power.”

A new study is revealing just how horrible AI is at grading student homework, and the results are worse than you think.