Trust Your Touch: Designing Durable Tactile Sensors for a Lifetime of Accuracy
- Michael Eichermueller
- Dec 12
- 2 min read
At Touchlab, our Design Principles guide the ongoing development of durable tactile sensors built to meet and exceed human capabilities for telerobotic and autonomous applications. A key focus is creating a solution that is not only high-performing but also offers a long lifespan and unparalleled durability with an endless amount of contact cycles. This means when you use our sensors, you can trust that the measured contact interactions that trained your AI models and telerobotic operators on day one are still the same years later.
How We Build Sensors That Last
We consider purpose-built designs and materials, leveraging many years of internal application experience as well as feedback from our customers. We test to standardised and custom needs.
Requirements set the basic performance criteria, including: contact normal and shear force range, daily contact cycles, environmental conditions, and specific durability needs. As is common in engineering, requirements can be at odds with each other and compromises need to be carefully evaluated. For instance:
What if one skin material provides great force sensitivity but degrades rapidly under shear forces?
Alternatively, what if another skin material can last millions of abrasion cycles but does not transfer force very accurately?
To balance these trade-offs and requirements, our designs undergo robust and comprehensive testing to best understand the limitations and advantages of our choices. Our in-house developed testbeds allow us to distill results to the exact requirement under test while limiting the noise from other factors.
For instance, we can measure the dynamic load response over the sensor's projected lifespan by obtaining results for 1 million load and de-load cycles at 150% of the rated sensor range, often in less than a week. In this test, ambient conditions can be adjusted for a variety of applications that operate in low or high temperature environments. Therefore, we can rapidly iterate across several material choices based on customer and/or product need to find a solution with the perfect balance of sensor performance and robustness.
Partnering with Touchlab: Your Path to Sensor Success
Touchlab’s flagship products are designed with general use cases in mind to target the largest application space possible, enabling greater robot dexterity across many industries.
You may have important needs that may not meet the general use case requirements, and for this, we offer our Bespoke Sensor Design Package to customers. This low-cost, low-risk, multi-step approach starts with a collaborative phase where you co-develop precise requirements with experienced Touchlab engineers.
The outcome of the initial phase is an agreed-upon requirements, timeline, and budget for a follow-on detailed design phase that is targeted to meet and exceed your sensor expectations. The best part of this design process is that the final Bespoke Design undergoes the same rigorous and robust testing as our standard products to ensure a lifetime of high performance and trusted tactile feedback.
