Tactile Data for Autonomous Driving Recognized with TU-Automotive Award

June 13, 2019

William Kucinski

Haifa, Israel-based Tactile Mobility (formerly MobiWize) has won the TU-Automotive Awards “Best Connected Product/Service for the Commercial Vehicle Market” award for its work on tactile sensing technology for advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) enabled smart vehicles with Level 2-3 autonomy and autonomous vehicle with Level 4-5 autonomy. The company also receive nominations in the “Best ADAS or Autonomous Product/Service” and “Best Data/AI Product/Service” categories.

The smart and autonomous vehicle industry primarily invests in and implements visual sensing technologies like lidar. Ninety-five percent of data used in these vehicles is visual. However, Tactile Mobility specializes in tactile sensing, which the company argues is required to meet and even surpass human driving capabilities. Tactile Mobility’s software collects "first order" data using a vehicle's embedded, non-visual sensors for data like wheel speed, wheel angle, engine revolutions per minute, and gear position – and then feeds it into a “Tactility Sensing Embedded Software Module” residing on one of the vehicle’s electronic control units ECUs).

This embedded software module runs proprietary algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) to generate real-time actionable insights about the vehicle-road dynamics. The data is also anonymized and uploaded to the cloud, analyzed, and applied to create crowd-sourced mapping that is critical for accurate, continually updated synopses of road conditions.

William Kucinski is content editor at SAE International, Aerospace Products Group in Warrendale, Pa. Previously, he worked as a writer at the NASA Safety Center in Cleveland, Ohio and was responsible for writing the agency’s System Failure Case Studies. His interests include literally anything that has to do with space, past and present military aircraft, and propulsion technology.

Contact him regarding any article or collaboration ideas by e-mail at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..