
Force-sensing wristband for training robotic AI
Hemlock is headquartered in Los Angeles, CA.
Force-sensing wristband for training robotic AI
Today's robots learn from video, which shows where a hand went but not how hard it gripped or pressed, so foundation models for robotics lack the force data needed for fine, contact-rich manipulation.
Hemlock makes a wearable bracelet with dry electrodes that reads the electrical signals driving muscle force, turning everyday human work into force-labeled demonstration data to train embodied AI.
It captures actual measured force finger-by-finger rather than a video-inferred estimate, needs no cameras, mocap rigs, or teleoperation, and delivers data pre-synced to footage in the format teams already train on.
Founded by Julian Olschwang, a teenage inventor who won the Broadcom MASTERS Lemelson Award for Invention and a Davidson Fellowship for an earlier sign-language-translating glove before starting this YC-backed company.
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