Touchlab, a deep tech company based at The Higgs Centre for Innovation in Edinburgh, Scotland that develops electronic skin (e-skin) for robots, has today announced that it has raised a further $4.8m in seed funding. The investment was led by Octopus Ventures, one of Europe’s largest and most active early-stage investors, with participation from existing investors, including Creator Fund and Techstart Ventures.

Despite skin enabling people to make sense of the world around them, there has been little progress with respect to giving robots a sense of touch similar to that of human skin.

Touchlab is solving this by developing low-profile tactile sensing skin, which can be wrapped around robots as an “electronic-skin” or e-skin. The company was born out of challenges that Founder Dr Zaki Hussein encountered as part of investigating e-skin. His PhD grant alone was not enough to fund manufacturing of a real-world solution for robots, so he founded a company that could  - and proceeded to work with suppliers and manufacturers such as Quantum Technology Supersensors. Two of the founder’s colleagues have also joined the team; Laura Garcia Caberol who did her product design Master’s project on e-skin integration into wearables, and Dr Vasilis Mitrakos.

Touchlab’s e-skin is thinner than human skin making it easily retrofittable without reducing the robot’s or gripper’s degrees-of-freedom (DoF). Machines fitted with Touchlab’s e-skin can now roll pens, grasp soft objects, and even detect slip (and compensate for it). Unlike older sensor technologies, TouchLab’s e-skin is also able to withstand a high load, sense direction in 3D - the “holy grail” of e-skin and important for detecting slip. It can also withstand extreme environments such as acid, high and low temperatures, and even radioactive environments, giving it unique ‘superhuman’ capabilities. Touchlabs' progress has caught the eye of several major companies including the client Sellafield Ltd. in the notoriously difficult to penetrate nuclear sector – a big achievement for such a young company. 

Touchlab intends to spend the funding on further strengthening its commercial and tech teams. In doing so, it plans to meet the growing demand for large-scale e-skin deployments in grasping and pick and & place automation, whilst continuing to develop and commercialise its telerobot technology to enable emerging high impact robotics applications.

Dr Zaki Hussein, Founder and CEO of Touchlab, commented: “Touch is the final frontier for robot interaction and entry into physical environments - enabling true dexterity and safety. We have taken on this challenge by developing a ‘full-stack’ solution; retrofittable e-skin that gathers the data, software to make sense of it, and integration to ensure it works in demanding applications - from grocery grasping to telerobotics in extreme environments. Octopus’ expertise propel us to achieve e-skin’s full potential and create a step-change in robotics.

Mason Sinclair, Investor at Octopus Ventures adds: “Touchlab has made truly pioneering advances with its technology in tactile sensing. Electronic skin will open a world of new opportunities and applications in robotics, making it an extremely exciting time for the industry. Zaki and the Touchlab team have a huge vision for the business, and we couldn’t be more thrilled to be supporting them on this journey”.

The e-skin also performs as a platform for Tele-operated Avatar technology, which Touchlab is currently developing in collaboration with Prof Vijayakumar and Dr Ivan from Edinburgh Centre for Robotics and Dr Navaraj from Nottingham Trent University. The teams’ ambition here is to enable true immersion in a foreign environment, where an operator can hear, see, speak, and touch through the Avatar. This technology is enabled by the (traditionally missing) sense of touch and has been demonstrated over a distance of more than 600 kilometres. Although not advertised as such, it could easily become part of a future metaverse to enable telecommuting, especially in dangerous environments.

The Telerobot is also seeing traction in the medical sector, where Touchlab has scheduled a pilot with a Finnish hospital (to run later this year). When using the Telerobot, a proxy will be installed between a healthcare provider and patient, which is expected to reduce the transmission of healthcare-acquired infections (HAI’s). According to the World Health Organisation, HAI’s are the “most frequent adverse event in healthcare delivery worldwide” (1). COVID-19 and antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections are just two examples of this.  The e-skin will enable the robot to be truly safe in this high-risk environment - both the robot and its operator will feel and react to anything they touch or bump into.