SynTouch News

Researchers at University of Pennsylvania's Haptics Group and UC Berkeley's ICSI have announced amazing progress in teaching a robot to learn haptic adjectives of real-world objects. Using a PR2 robot equipped with BioTac sensors the group trained a robot to perform a set of exploratory movements while collecting haptic information from the BioTacs. In a separate experiment, the same objects were presented to human subjects who labeled them with common haptic adjectives such as (i.e. "fuzzy", "squishy", "smooth", etc. - a total of 34 adjectives were used in the study). The robot was then trained with this data and learned how to associate the measured tactile information with the tactile adjectives. When presented with new objects the robot performed amazingly well and was able to correctly identify the properties of the new object.

The work, which was presented this year at ICRA, won the award for best paper in cognitive robotics. We would like to congratulate our friends and colleagues at U Penn and Berkeley for their great work! It has been a pleasure to have had the opportunity to work with your team the past few years and we're excited to see such interesting work being done!

The original press release from IEEE spectrum can be found here

The announcement from the University of Pennsylvania can be found here

SynTouch was pleased to be an exhibitor at ICRA 2013 in Karlsruhe, Germany. It was great to catch up with old and new faces to discuss the latest in robotics. This year we introduced our newest low-cost tactile sensor concept, the NumaTac (sounds like pneumatic). The NumaTac is a reduced function version of the BioTac that is designed to meet the needs of many applications at a fraction of the cost of the BioTac. Stay tuned for more details.

Our Director of Research, Jeremy Fishel, presented some of our latest research on tactile identification of objects using the BioTac and contact detection reflexes based on tactile sensing. Overall we had a great time and look forward to the next event!

SynTouch LLC (Los Angeles) and the University of Southern California jointly announced a major advance in robotics today. In an article appearing in Frontiers in Neurorobotics today, Jeremy Fishel and Gerald Loeb describe a specialized robot equipped with a new sensor that mimics the sensitivity of the human fingertip. The robot outperformed humans in identifying a wide range of natural materials according to their textures.

The research team at SynTouch combined their BioTac® sensor with a new algorithm that imitates the exploratory strategies that humans use to identify objects. The specialized robot was trained on 117 common materials gathered from fabric, stationery and hardware stores. When confronted with one material at random, it could identify the exact material 95% of the time, after intelligently selecting and making an average of five exploratory movements. It was much less likely to be confused by a pair of similar textures than human subjects making their own exploratory movements.

"This demonstrates the potential of tactile sensing to revolutionize both industrial robots and prosthetic hands, which have lacked such sensing," said Dr. Fishel, Director of Research at SynTouch. Researchers throughout the world are starting to use the company's BioTac sensors to enable human-like dexterity.

The research article from Frontiers in Neurorobotics is available HERE

The press release from the University of Southern California is available HERE

SynTouch would like to thank the conference organizers and attendees for making Haptics 2012 a great success! At the conference we were able to demonstrate our BioTac technology to a large number of attendees and received a great deal of positive feedback.

Below are some photographs (thanks to Dr. Katherine J. Kuchenbecker). Additional photographs and details of the conference can be found here.

SynTouch, developers of the BioTac multimodal tactile sensor, today announces the appointment of its new Chief Operating Officer. David Groves has taken over as COO from founding partner Nicholas Wettels who helped establish SynTouch in its early years.

David brings more than 20 years of management and business development experience in the medical device, consulting and manufacturing fields. David received his MBA from the USC Marshall School of Business in 2002. In addition to operations supervision, he will be working with our expanding distribution network and strategic industry partners.

"I am looking forward to this new challenge and working with SynTouch," said Groves, "the SynTouch technology is compelling and I am proud to be a part of this."

"I am most pleased to announce that David Groves has accepted our offer to be the next Chief Operating Officer for SynTouch," said Gerald Loeb, CEO of SynTouch, "I look forward to this great opportunity to move ahead with new expertise."

Welcome to our new website!

We've added many new features including:

1. Updated Company and Team Information
2. New Technical Publications
3. A Whitepaper on Multimodal Tactile Sensing
4. Details of Each Sensing Modality and Links to Publications
5. Updated Product Information
6. Summaries of our Research Projects
7. Links to Customers, Collaborators and Distributors
8. ... and much more!

Thank you for visiting and we hope you enjoy the new look!