IN Brief:
- Tacta's Woodlands facility will initially manufacture the glove used by its Skill Capture system.
- The wearable records force, motion, and temperature data from skilled manufacturing tasks.
- Tacta is working with A*STAR IME to scale production of the tactile sensors used by its robotic platform.
Tacta Systems has opened a manufacturing and engineering base in Singapore to increase production of tactile sensing hardware used to capture skilled manual tasks for robotic automation.
The Woodlands operation will initially manufacture the Tacta Glove, a wearable component of the company’s Skill Capture system. Tacta says the glove records force, motion, and temperature while a skilled worker performs a task, with the sensor data combined with video to train its robotic manipulation platform.
The company is also working with Singapore’s A*STAR Institute of Microelectronics to begin scaling production of the tactile sensors at the centre of the system. That work extends the new site beyond final assembly and into the sensor manufacturing required for wider deployment.
Tacta expects the Singapore operation to support customer activity in electronics manufacturing, AI infrastructure, and automotive production from early 2027. The site is its first manufacturing and engineering base outside the United States, with additional hiring planned across manufacturing, engineering, and test roles.
The electronic sensing is intended to capture parts of a manual operation that vision alone cannot describe. Cameras can establish where an object is positioned and how it moves, but connector insertion, cable handling, assembly of delicate components, and similar work can also depend on how force develops at the contact surface.
The Tacta Glove records those physical interactions while the operator performs the task in a conventional working motion. Force, movement, and temperature measurements are combined with video to create training data for the company’s Tacta Hand and wider robotic system.
That places the sensors at the beginning of the automation process rather than treating them as feedback devices added after a robotic motion has been programmed. If the captured force or motion is inconsistent, the resulting data provide an inaccurate representation of the task the system is supposed to reproduce.
Repeatability therefore becomes as important as sensitivity. A wearable sensor system used by different workers and across multiple manufacturing locations has to produce measurements that remain sufficiently consistent for the data to be compared, while also surviving handling and repeated use.
Mechanical integration adds another constraint. Tactile elements need to capture contact without preventing the user from performing the task naturally, while their wiring, signal conditioning, calibration, and data acquisition have to fit within a wearable form factor.
Scaling the underlying sensors creates a separate manufacturing challenge from assembling a small number of development units. Higher production has to maintain electrical behaviour, calibration characteristics, and yield if data collected from one glove are to remain comparable with measurements from another.
The collaboration with A*STAR IME is therefore closely tied to the commercial expansion. Singapore provides semiconductor and advanced manufacturing infrastructure alongside the customer base Tacta is targeting, giving the company access to both production expertise and regional electronics manufacturing activity.
Singapore’s Economic Development Board is supporting the expansion, while EDBI is an investor in Tacta. The company says hiring will accelerate during the fourth quarter as the Woodlands operation adds manufacturing, engineering, and test capability.
The facility follows the public unveiling of Tacta’s technology by less than two months, leaving the platform at an early stage of commercial deployment. Production ramp-up and work with manufacturing customers in 2027 will provide the first evidence of how the sensing system performs beyond demonstrations.
Tasks involving flexible wiring, small connectors, or fragile components remain difficult to automate when successful handling depends on contact conditions that are hard to infer from images alone. Tacta’s manufacturing expansion is aimed at making the tactile electronics needed for those applications available in greater volume, with sensor consistency likely to be as important as the AI system trained from their data.
