GelSight Brings AI to Physical Touch With GelSight Mobile 3.2 Software Update

New features revolutionize metrology and inspection processes with nondimensional AI inspection

Published: Wednesday, March 22, 2023 - 12:01

(GelSight: Waltham, MA) -- GelSight, a pioneer in tactile intelligence technology, has announced the release of its GelSight Mobile 3.2 software package, bringing significant new capabilities to GelSight mobile systems. GelSight Mobile 3.2 digitizes tactile sensing for many new applications with an innovative set of new features that bring outdated, manual processes into the digital age.

GelSight Mobile 3.2 takes the capabilities of the portable GelSight Mobile systems beyond quantitative metrology by enabling nondimensional inspection and measurement with a unique tactile artificial intelligence toolbox. This new software also features Operator Mode, which streamlines the user interface and allows for the customization of analysis features. Additionally, for line workers who need to continually improve productivity, GelSight has made substantial structural improvements to the core analysis algorithm, reducing analysis compute time by 2–10x in batch mode analysis routines compared to GelSight Mobile 3.0. Furthermore, GelSight Mobile 3.2 adds surface roughness analysis, a feature that is a game-changer in the world of portable surface metrology and texture understanding.

Billions of manual tactile interactions occur every day. With this software release, GelSight is enabling the digitization of many of these previously manual, qualitative measurements performed with the inspector’s eye or fingernail. Millions of Industry 1.0 inspections have resisted quantification, but now, with GelSight Mobile 3.2, these inspections are advancing to Industry 4.0 with major benefits to production quality and velocity. For the first time, using artificial intelligence, engineers can train the Gelsight Mobile system to replicate assessments that previously required touching and feeling a surface, enabling them to digitally quantify these assessments in a repeatable, user-agnostic process. For example, GelSight Mobile 3.2 users can now digitally characterize the texture of polished metals on consumer products or dashboards in a car, thanks to this new software release pairing tactile sensing and AI for the first time.

“About 3 million inspectors work on production and maintenance lines performing manual touch inspections every day to make critical decisions about whether a plane is fit to fly, or an automotive part meets quality standards to keep drivers safe,” says Dennis Lang, chief business officer at GelSight. “Together with the new AI platform, GelSight Mobile’s superhuman touch sensor with micron-level resolution is helping to automate and standardize these processes, mitigating human error in these crucial situations.”

Key features of the GelSight 3.2 software update include:

• AI Toolbox for nondimensional measurement: Users of GelSight Mobile 3.2’s AI Toolbox can create their own AI models to apply touch sensing to many tasks which previously had no simple path to digitization. The AI Toolbox supports three types of tasks: classification, detection, and segmentation. Each type of task has various applications, such as quality grading of the materials of an automotive interior, which is a classification problem, corrosion detection, which is a detection problem, and scratch recognition, which can be treated as a segmentation problem.
• Operator Mode: Allows any user to access GelSight Mobile’s capabilities with a streamlined user interface that gives customers the ability to customize routines and select pass/fail criteria. Operator Mode is password-protected and simplifies repeated measurement in a clean and structured way with preset configurations.
• Surface roughness analysis: GelSight Mobile systems natively capture area data within milliseconds. Adding surface roughness, an area measurement, is a natural extension of the GelSight solution portfolio. With GelSight Mobile 3.2, surface roughness analysis is now available in addition to the previously released profile roughness capabilities. With the click of a button, customers can now perform repeated digital Sa and Ra measurements, revolutionizing the way roughness measurements are currently done.

“In everyday life, humans rely on their sense of touch when their vision fails or is not enough to gather the information that they need from any given situation,” says Youssef Benmokhtar, CEO at GelSight. “GelSight Mobile 3.2 is digitizing the fingertip—what people can feel—to streamline traditionally manual processes for metrologists and inspectors, and provide them with data-driven insights that allow them to make more informed decisions.”

GelSight Mobile 3.2 is now available. Request more information by contacting info@gelsight.com. To learn more about GelSight Mobile, visit https://www.gelsight.com/solutions/surface-metrology-mobile/.

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