Toronto, Ontario — Tactile Mobility and BMW have announced that software from Israel’s Tactile Mobility will be included in BMW’s next generation of vehicles beginning in 2021.
The idea behind the collaboration is to equip vehicles with the ability to analyze the road surface attributes under their tires, enabling detection of road conditions.
Tactile Mobility is known for its software that uses vehicle’s non-visual sensors such as wheel speed, wheel angle, RPM and gear position to assist smart and autonomous vehicles to pick up on road dynamics and conditions.
Tactile Mobility extracts data from existing built-in sensors, such as wheel speed, brakes paddle position and additional systems, and utilizes the data to create a new unified signal that represents the state of the road and vehicle.
For example, when driving over an icy road, a car camera does not detect the ice, as the black ice resembles the road. The virtual sensor cleans up the background noise, and by using signal-processing techniques, applying its proprietary algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI), it enables the representation of the ground as it actually is.
Tactile Mobility has said they have secured $9 million in funding from a group of investors that includes Porsche. Porsche has also said that it will use Tactile Mobility’s technology in its vehicles in the future.
The partnership between BMW and Tactile mobility began through the BMW Startup Garage, the venture client unit of the BMW Group.
