11.15-16.23-RD-Surplex

NADER KARAYANNI: Hi, everyone. My name is Nader-- cofounder and CTO at Surplex. And we are part of MIT START.Nano, which is an accelerator that helps deeptech startups. So I want you to imagine for a second that you lost the sense of feeling in your hand. And you're trying to hold a plastic cup filled with your favorite juice.

Now, what's going to happen is that you're either going to crush the cup, spilling out the juice, or you're not going to apply enough pressure, so the cup will fall. This is the problem that robots face. You see, robots need tactile pressure sensors enabled to operate.

And much like the human skin, the requirements of such tactile pressure sensors are similar. They need to be sensitive to enable them to understand different ranges accurately of pressure. They need to be dense and enable sensing from any point of the surface, and not just a small number of points.

And finally, they need to be flexible to be able to apply to any surface, and even if the surface stretches a little bit after deployment. And on top of all that, if you want your solution to be actually adopted, it needs to be mass-production-ready and affordable.

And unfortunately, current tactile pressure sensors do not provide that. And so engineers and researchers alike have to make significant sacrifices when choosing their tactile pressure solution-- until today. We have re-engineered tactile pressure sensors. With a new design, and a new fabrication method, and the novel choice of material, we have created our patented tactile pressure sensors.

So what makes our sensors unique, first of all, is their sensitivity. We're able to detect pressures from holding an empty plastic cup and up to 100-kilogram person standing on the sensors accurately. They are dense, meaning each point on the surface of the sensors can actually detect pressure and not just a small number of points.

And they're flexible, making them being able to be applied to any surface regardless of its shape, and even if it changes and stretches after deployment. And on top of all that, we democratized tactile pressure sensors. With achieving 90% cost reduction, we enable use cases that are previously just simply not business-viable to be able to be viable today.

In order to maximize the value provided by our sensors, we provide an optional AI layer on top of the sensor's data. So when engineers want to use our sensors, they can get insights into the sensor's data by using our APIs that will provide them access to the insights from the data.

For example, our AI models can extract features, can provide semantic segmentation, and even detect abnormalities and events according to your use case. Let's take an example of how Surplex is providing value to our clients and production. So Neurocean is a robotics company. And they're building a dexterous robotic hand.

As we saw earlier, for that, you need tactile pressure sensors. And so in an integration that took less than two hours, including placing the hardware and integrating the software, we were able to deploy our tactile pressure sensors on the fingertips of the robotic hand.

Each fingertip is around a centimeter square. And we were able to deploy 36 sensing points on that small surface. And thanks to our flexible design, the integration was seamless, regardless of the shape of the fingertip.

And so while our main focus is on the robotics industry and providing value there, Surplex can provide value to other industries, such as healthcare, and automotive, and more. To put it simply, any industry that can capitalize on tactile pressure sensors and AI on top of that can benefit from Surplex's technology.

Before I leave you to the rest of the event, we at Surplex are looking for partners. So if you and your organization are looking to integrate our state-of-the-art tactile pressure sensors into your systems and are excited into exploring possibilities for innovation into how to utilize AI on top of the sensor's data, we're looking to talk to you and figure out how we can together push forward innovation. Thank you, and looking forward to meeting with you.