UK – Touchlab, a deep tech company based at The Higgs Centre for Innovation in Edinburgh, Scotland that develops electronic skin (e-skin) for robots, raised a further $4.8m in seed funding.
The round was led by Octopus Ventures, with participation from existing investors, including Creator Fund and Techstart Ventures.The company intends to use the funding to strengthen its commercial and tech teams. Founded by Dr Zaki Hussein, Laura Garcia Caberol and Dr Vasilis Mitrakos, Touchlab manufactures an e-skin system which can be wrapped around hard or soft robots to sense pressure, location, and direction in real-time. 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. 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). 23/02/2022
