Desire Athow

XOCEAN uses fleets of centrally controlled uncrewed surface vessels to collect oceanographic, bathymetric and environmental data for offshore energy, fishing and other industries. Cloud connectivity and near-real-time processing allow clients to access usable marine data faster than through traditional crewed survey vessels. CEO James Ives explains that XOCEAN’s scalable model relies on numerous lower-cost assets, AWS infrastructure and remote operations, while also broadening participation in maritime careers. The company says its work has supported projects representing about 48 GW of offshore wind capacity and could contribute to more than 100 GW through its current pipeline. Future advances are expected in autonomy, power systems, edge processing and closed-loop operational decision-making.

Touchlab is developing thin, quantum-tunnelling-based electronic skin that enables robots to detect pressure, force, direction and incipient slipping with sub-millisecond response times. The technology is intended to improve robotic handling of delicate objects and support applications in manufacturing, healthcare and domestic environments. Key barriers to mass adoption include durability, packaging, affordability, integration across different robot designs and slow hardware-market adoption. Touchlab plans to combine bespoke integrations with scalable tactile components, edge computing and shared autonomy so robots can manage low-level grip adjustments while human operators focus on higher-level tasks. The company aims to make tactile sensing as widespread in commercial robotics as MEMS sensors, while using encryption and on-premises processing to protect multimodal data in sensitive deployments.

The piece examines Forward’s approach to making network changes safer through a mathematically accurate digital twin of a company’s production environment. Forward Predict models configurations and operational states across devices, vendors, cloud infrastructure, routing, firewalls, segmentation and compliance controls, allowing proposed changes to be tested before deployment. Forward co-founder and Chief AI Officer Nikhil Handigol says the model is continuously synchronized with live network conditions and can provide deterministic proof of likely outcomes rather than probabilistic risk estimates. The article argues that this capability could replace traditional change windows and war rooms, and become essential as autonomous systems begin proposing and executing changes at machine speed.