Eric Acome, Co-Founder & CEO of Artimus Robotics, is a featured presenter at Smart Haptics 2023. Ahead of the conference, Producer Rebecca List sat down with Eric to discuss his presentation and his excitement for the 2023 event!

Why have you decided to present at Smart Haptics 2023?

Presenting at Smart Haptics is a great opportunity to get our soft actuator technology in front of leading experts in the haptics industry. We will have a booth with some demos, but the presentation is a chance to share more details about our technology.

Your presentation is titled Soft Electrohydraulic Actuators for Haptics. Can you tell us more about why you’re excited to share your insights with this year’s attendees?

Artimus Robotics is commercializing a new type of soft electrohydraulic actuator that combines flexible materials, liquid, and electrostatic forces to create a wide variety of motions. Haptics is an interesting application for this technology because we can provide unique sensations that aren’t possible with traditional electromagnetic actuators (ERMs, LRAs) or piezo actuators.

What do you think are some of the challenges currently facing this industry? How does an event like this help to address and explore those challenges?

We believe there is an opportunity to provide more nuanced haptic feedback, especially in lower frequency ranges where existing technologies are not able to operate. Smart Haptics is a good opportunity to test that hypothesis and get meaningful feedback from key players in the industry.

Haptics is such an interdisciplinary field. It requires many different skill sets that you might not find under one roof. Our company specializes in actuators, but we’re relatively new to haptics. And integrating our technology with a wearable that syncs with a virtual environment or creating a human-machine interface in a vehicle requires additional expertise. For newcomers like us, being able to easily collaborate with partners and other players in the haptics industry is an important challenge. At Smart Haptics we hope to learn more about the different pieces of the haptic ecosystem and build good relationships with other players in the industry.

What are you most looking forward to at the conference?

We’re looking forward to meeting with people in the haptics industry to learn more about challenges that need to be solved and how Artimus can help.