Tactile Mobility raises $9 million to derive insights from vehicle sensor data
Summary
Tactile Mobility chairman and managing partner of LAIG investments Jorge De Pablo noted that the company is collaborating with “several” global OEMs (including Ford and Porsche) and road authorities across the U.S., Europe, and Asia, and he expects the capital infusion will accelerate product R&D on the eve of go-to-market operation expansion. The insights are fed into onboard computers to optimize driving decisions before they’re uploaded to Tactile Mobility’s cloud, which produces a real-time and anonymized map of road features like grades, banking, curvature, normalized grip levels, and the location of bumps and potholes. ) Bespoke models handle tasks such as data ingestion, fusion, noise cleaning, and processing, in theory ensuring high accuracy without the need for human oversight. The system’s potentials also lie in predictive servicing and optimising battery management.” Tactile Mobility isn’t the only startup performing sensor fusion to measure road roughness, it’s worth noting. Swedish company NIRA Dynamics applies machine learning algorithms to vehicle sensors, controllers, and camera feeds to measure metrics like grip and friction in real time, and apps like RoadBounce detect problematic sections of road from smartphone accelerometer and gyroscope data alone.