EP #465 - Barbara Horvath: How to Give Robots a New Skin with Printed Electronics

This episode was produced in collaboration with startup days, taking place next year on May 14th 2025. Click ⁠here⁠ to purchase your ticket.

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About Barbara Horvath:

Barbara Horvath is the co-founder and CEO of Inveel, a startup providing technology for low-cost and high speed production of extreme-high resolution printed electronics. She holds a PhD in Materials Science & Engineering from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, and worked as a researcher at the National Institute for Materials Science (Japan), the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (France) and the Paul Scherrer Institut (Zurich) before starting Inveel in 2024.

Inveel fabricates 100 nm - 2 µm linewidth wires and electrodes with low resistivity — this what they term their “high precision electronics”. At first they struggled with finding a market, since the applications for their tech were very numerous, but eventually settled on robotics. Inveel adds value to a robot by basically giving it another layer of “skin”, full of “nerve endings”, which help the robot better understand how it is interacting with the world. For instance:

• If a robot is holding an egg, having an Inveel skin is useful to know how much pressure to apply in order to maintain grip but not crush the egg. If the egg starts slipping, the robot will know because it will feel the egg in different parts of their “hand”, and can adjust the movements of their “hand” to prevent the egg from escaping their grasp.
• If a robot bumps their knee, it is very easy for their whole balance to be thrown off and for them to fall over. If their knee is wearing an Inveel skin, the robot can react faster to the perception of having bumped it and more quickly readjust their body posture so as not to fall down.
• If a robot needs to go up and down stairs, or walk in terrain where there are voluminous rocks, having an Inveel skin on the soles of their “feet” will help them ascertain whether they’re placing their “feet” correctly on the steps of the stairs, and will help them quickly realize they’ve stepped on a rock, and again adapt their body posture so as not to fall over.

Inveel skins also give robots proximity sensors, which allow them to sense if a person (or object) is nearby. Currently, robots have cameras through which they perceive the presence of people, and when they detect people, they slow down quite a lot as a form of risk mitigation. Inveel’s proximity sensors allow robots to remain fast even in environments filled with people, because they make them much quicker in reacting to the presence of a person and avoiding collision. 

Inveel is currently establishing pilots with big players and kicking their R&D into turbo mode in order to cater successfully to the robotics industry.

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