The tactile sensor technology comes from startup company Tactile Mobility (Haifa, Israel). This company announces the conclusion of a commercial partnership with BMW - with the aim of embedding this technology in BMW vehicles from next year. For Tactile Mobility, this is one of the first commercial successes with vehicle OEMs - and certainly the most important to date.
Tactile Mobility's technology will enable vehicle manufacturers to improve the performance of their cars. To do this, the company uses "non-visual" sensors in the vehicles - it was not possible to find out more precise details at first; presumably these are vibration and motion sensors in the chassis and wheel suspensions. This data is forwarded to a control unit which uses Tactile Mobility's software to determine, among other things, the road condition and grip of the road surface - in real time, of course. The software uses a vehicle-specific behavioural model called VehicleDNA.
