The mission: “Unleashing the limitless possibilities of tactile sensing”

​​GelSight is a pioneer in digital, imaging-based tactile intelligence. The proprietary technology enables digital tactile sensing with the sensitivity and resolution of human touch to transform industrial process efficiency, accuracy, and quality. 

“The digitisation of sensors has created a positive revolution every time it has happened,” explains Youssef Benmokhtar, chief executive officer. “The digitisation of vision and sound have both changed the world. Now we are digitising touch and building a business around that core concept. We have a proven ability to translate our breakthrough science into well-engineered, easy-to-use products that solve real-world problems across a range of industries.”

The problem we’re addressing 

A large amount of quality control still happens manually in factories across the world because certain factors and faults can’t be observed by sight and need to be touched to test or measure quality. “Our sensor technology hardware enables you to have that precise understanding when vision doesn’t work well or can’t work,” says the CEO. “We provide you with that sense of perception.”

GelSight’s technology is also especially timely because of increasing labor shortages. “Companies, especially in aerospace, have been relying on inspectors that have been doing this for 20, 30, 40 years and they’re really good at it,” says Benmokhtar. “But now, nobody wants these repetitive types of manufacturing jobs. Our technology basically gives that augmentation by providing people with tools to perform tasks that traditionally require more training or manual inspection skills.”

Meanwhile, companies across all sectors are expected to improve productivity. “We offer the ability to do more with less and show a very quick return on investment,” says Benmokhtar. 

What we do 

GelSight’s tactile intelligence technology digitises touch with human-like sensitivity and high-resolution using a breakthrough elastomeric tactile sensing platform. GelSight’s products create a soft, high-resolution, tactile sensor that conforms like human skin to the shape of an object on contact, precisely capturing the topography of the surface.

“Wherever vision struggles or is not capable of giving you the understanding of the physical world, GelSight provides you that understanding through touch,” says Benmokhtar. “We’re building a tactile intelligence platform based on the hardware that we have, and also adding software applications on top of it to provide our customers with different ways to leverage the output from those sensors.”

GelSight allows you to inspect and measure any material regardless of composition, reflectivity, or transparency  – things that vision systems may struggle with. It is also agnostic to lighting environments and can operate in everything from bright light to complete darkness. 

Our history 

GelSight was born from leading-edge academic research. Its co-founders Professor Ted Adelson, Kimo Johnson, and Janos Rohaly, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), have developed new technologies in the fields of 3D imaging, perceptual modelling, and signal processing, building a rich IP portfolio. 

Interesting fact about GelSight 

The Norwegian ski team has publicly acknowledged GelSight’s important role in their success as a gold medallist. The company’s 3D measurement device helped the team to measure snow on the slopes to help skiers to understand how the surface of their skis would interact with snow. 

What we hope from Sixth Sense 

“The combination of Hexagon’s scanning products and Gelsight’s unique tactile sensing intelligence platform will offer a full solution for the detection and measurement of defects, as well as integration into customers’ product digital twins,” said Benmokhtar. “This breakthrough solution can all be managed in Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence software and will translate into considerable productivity improvements for our customers, ultimately helping Hexagon and Gelsight develop stronger relationships with existing customers and win new accounts.”