tactile measurement infrastructure

Touch is the least trustworthy signal your model consumes.

Sensors drift, elastomers remember, clocks disagree, and sim contact never met a real fingertip. Tensiq standardizes tactile observations, characterizes real sensors, and produces evaluations you can defend.

force_z1.84 N
uncertainty±0.06 N
validtrue
driftnominal
provenancecal_2026-06-30
synclocked
where to start

Three stages, one unreliable boundary.

Different teams hit different failures. Same instrument underneath. Each entry point stands on its own, so keep your pipeline and take only what earns its place.

the problems

If one of these sentences is yours, we should talk.

YOUR DATA LIES TO YOU
"Same press, different reading. The sensor remembers the last minute."

Hysteresis and viscoelasticity. Elastomers relax under held load, respond differently on the second press, and change with loading rate. Your model is learning a mapping whose input is silently history-dependent, spending capacity on the sensor's constitutive quirks instead of on manipulation. None of it transfers when a pad is replaced. We expose and correct the repeatable parts of this behavior before the data reaches your model.

"Loss converged. Ablation says the model ignores touch entirely."

The tactile channel contributes nothing. You paid for the sensors, the integration, and the data collection, and the model learned to ignore all of it. Either touch was genuinely redundant for the task, or the channel arrived unsynced, hysteretic, and unit-inconsistent, so the model was right to discard it. You cannot tell those apart without a clean channel to compare against. We give you the clean channel and the comparison.

INTEGRATION AND SIM CORRESPONDENCE
"91% in sim, 64% on the robot, and one number to debug with."

The sim-to-real gap is a scalar. The gap arrives at the end of the pipeline, after weeks of training, with no decomposition. Contact model? Sensor response? Randomization ranges? One worn pad? You cannot debug a gap you cannot decompose. We measure sim and real tactile streams in the same format and report where they correspond and where they diverge, by contact regime.

"Vision says contact at t. Tactile says t plus 40 ms. Which is it?"

Timing and sync. Vision at 30 Hz, tactile at 200 Hz to 1 kHz, proprioception at 500 Hz, separate clocks, unmeasured driver latency. Slip onset happens in tens of milliseconds, so a 40 ms offset means the model sees the consequence before the cause. Policies still train on this and quietly plateau. Nearest-timestamp matching in the dataloader cannot fix what the recording didn't capture.

EVALUATION AND REPRODUCIBILITY
"Same checkpoint. Rig 3 says 71%. Rig 9 says 58%."

Unknown eval noise floor. Is the policy brittle or is rig 9's fingertip worn? Without a characterized apparatus you cannot tell a 6-point improvement from sensor drift, and teams burn weeks chasing regressions that were a dying pad. We establish the noise floor of your rigs and gate eval runs on sensor health, so the numbers you compare are comparable.

"We reported 'never exceeds 15 N.' Someone asked how we know."

Force claims without instruments. Safety bounds and compliance claims rest on readings from sensors nobody characterized, with unknown drift. When a partner, reviewer, or regulator asks for the basis of the claim, there isn't one. TT-instrumented episodes make force-domain assertions checkable, with calibrated uncertainty, and the eval report is versioned and auditable.

what changes

What you get once the boundary is instrumented.

Integrate in days, not months

One consistent interface instead of rebuilding sensor-specific pipelines every time the hardware changes.

Keep the data you collect usable

Know which samples are valid, comparable, calibrated, and traceable, while the corpus is still being written.

Debug contact failures faster

Separate policy error from sensor drift, timing offsets, rig variation, and sim mismatch instead of guessing.

evaluation

Evaluation
is a measurement problem. We treat it like one.

A single success rate cannot tell you whether the policy failed, the sensor drifted, or the rig changed.

Contact-event timing

Know whether the model catches contact, load onset, slip, and release at the right moment.

Uncertainty calibration

Know whether your model's confidence can be trusted before you build a constraint on it.

Sim-to-real correspondence

See where your simulator matches reality and where it diverges, by contact regime.

Rig health gating

Stop rig variance from masquerading as policy variance.

Every run ships as a versioned report another site can reproduce.

get in touch

Tell us where touch is fighting you.

Say what you're building. If one of the sentences up top was yours, name it. We'll map the fastest path to something useful: an integration, a characterization, or an eval pilot. A few technical details or a logged data session are enough to start.

Prefer email? info@tensiq.com. We'll use this information only to respond to your request. A short representative log is plenty; please don't send anything confidential or export-controlled.