Touch is the first sensory system to develop in human embryos and is by far the most complex. It is critical to memory and to all fine motor tasks including the ones we take for granted, like balance. It is hard to understate what we can accomplish once we digitally harness this power.
Modern Digital Controls Lack True Touch
Even the most advanced haptic interfaces and robotic systems offer only basic feedback — vibrations or single-directional force cues — with limited resolution and no real-time response.
Yet, as digital environments grow richer and more interactive, and as physical automation expands, realistic touch becomes essential. Humans require tactile feedback to navigate digital worlds naturally; machines require tactile data to understand and respond to the physical world accurately. In both cases, realistic touch is not a nice to have — it’s a necessity.
The Future of Touch
Sensetics has created the first-ever fabrics capable both of sensing actual tactile experiences and of reproducing the feeling of touch. Sensetics Touch Signature™ Programmable Fabrics, backed by AI-powered touch capture and editing software, grant a user the ability to experience in real time what a remotely operated vehicle, surgical tool, robot, or other user is touching, all at the resolution of the nerve endings in our fingertips.
Touch AI
Just as computer vision depends on visual data, the next generation of autonomous systems depends on touch data—the physical information our fingertips constantly gather and our brains translate into sensation. By digitizing this new perceptive sense beyond sight and sound, Sensetics provides a cornerstone in the foundation of Physical AI.
Designed for the Real World
Sensetics fabrics are thin, flexible, durable, and biocompatible. They can be wrapped around curved surfaces and embedded within other materials. They are capable of detecting millinewtons (less than a gram) and of withstanding a thousand newtons (100 kilograms).
Realistic Touch Data
Our system records not only where and how hard something is contacted, but what it actually feels like, mapping the spatial distributions and frequencies of texture alongside the direction and magnitudes of various forces, all at resolution exceeding that of human fingertips.
Realistic Touch Feedback
To produce realistic touch sensations, Programmable FabricsTM are capable not only of vibrating, but of multi-directional complex motions such as shear, torque, stretch, and bending, all at sub millimeter precision and across the full range of frequencies that your fingers can detect.
Immersive Virtual Environments
Using Sensetics touch controllers, users can visualize, edit, and relive tactile experiences within virtual environments, boosting productivity alongside immersivity, and enabling previously unreachable tasks such as hands-on virtual training and remote support.
Machine Learning Touch Processing
Sensetics software uses advanced machine learning algorithms to interpret an object’s physical characteristics and to differentiate between similar objects, providing new and valuable information with millisecond latency that cannot be discerned via computer vision.
The Touch Signature™ Library
Each interaction contributes to the Touch Signature™ Library, a growing database of physical experiences. This dataset allows machines and systems to recognize, classify, and reproduce tactile interactions with human-like precision.
Training Data Sets
By supplying a broad array of realistic touch data that has been indexed, classified, and cleaned, Sensetics brings the literal physical data to Physical AI, helping to enable the next generation of autonomous and semi-autonomous platforms that can safely navigate, manipulate, and learn from real-world environments.
Real-time Sensing & Feedback
Signals are captured and processed at millisecond-scale speeds, providing continuous and perceptually instantaneous feedback.
Ready to get involved? Contact us today.
