Together, they aim to deliver a joint solution for robot-enabled non-destructive testing (NDT) with autonomous process control. This solution integrates GelSight's tactile sensing technology into Flexxbotics’ system to enable advanced robotic machine tending, offering highly accurate quality inspections and digital thread traceability that can reduce inspection time by 40% or more.
Next-generation smart factories—particularly in industries such as aerospace, defence, medical devices, and automotive, where precision is paramount—can now leverage industrial and collaborative robots to significantly accelerate inspection processes, boost throughput, and enhance profitability. GelSight’s cutting-edge technology uses 3D imaging to capture surface finishes and detect defects at the micron level on any material. By incorporating GelSight’s tactile sensing devices into Flexxbotics’ platform, businesses can now conduct hundreds of precise measurements directly on the production line, avoiding the need to move parts to specialised lab equipment or rely on external laboratory services.
Flexxbotics ensures seamless communication between robots and GelSight devices, orchestrating the entire process and connecting directly with existing business systems in the plant, such as CAD/PLM, QMS, and IIoT, for closed-loop quality control. Flexxbotics automatically inputs the Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing (GD&T) data for each part into the robot and GelSight programmes, ensuring accurate measurement of critical characteristics. Inspection results are gathered for tracking and analysing non-conformances, with data optionally transferred to quality repositories and MES systems. Flexxbotics also issues defect alerts via text and email, with prior operations receiving escalations to identify root causes and make corrections, following autonomous process control instructions from Flexxbotics.
“Together GelSight and Flexxbotics provide a new level of inspection productivity, scrap reduction, and cost savings using tactile sensing and production robotics,” said Youssef Benmokhtar, CEO, GelSight. “Now, even the most challenging aspects to dimensionally measure accurately can be consistently inspected in a fraction of the time using robotics.”
“We believe robot-driven manufacturing is the future, and our partnership with GelSight combines some of the most advanced automated inspection capabilities on the planet with Flexxbotics production robotic orchestration for next level factory autonomy,” added Tyler Bouchard, CEO and Co-Founder of Flexxbotics. “Using GelSight tactile sensing to inspect during production enables robots to achieve micron-scale measurement accuracy bringing autonomous process control with Flexxbotics to the most complex geometry parts.”
