XELA Robotics introduced its uSkin 3D tactile sensing expertise at CES 2026, displaying how superior contact sensing can enhance manipulation and automation in humanoid and industrial robots.
The UK-based firm, which focuses on tactile sensor {hardware} and software program, demonstrated uSkin built-in into robotic palms and grippers, highlighting how robots can detect contact forces, object form, and motion inside a grasp.
The system is designed to offer robots with a extra detailed sense of contact than is usually accessible utilizing pressure or imaginative and prescient sensors alone.
In line with the corporate, the expertise is already being utilized in educational analysis and business pilot tasks. The CES demonstrations centered on purposes the place robots should deal with objects delicately and constantly, equivalent to manufacturing, logistics, warehousing, and agriculture.
XELA Robotics mentioned its tactile sensors are constructed from a versatile elastomer and could be built-in throughout bigger floor areas of a robotic hand, together with fingertips, phalanges, and the palm.
This differs from many present robotic palms, which rely totally on fingertip sensing. The corporate mentioned broader sensor protection allows extra steady gripping and manipulation, notably for irregular or fragile objects.
In December 2025, XELA Robotics introduced that it had built-in uSkin sensors right into a five-fingered anthropomorphic robotic hand produced by Tesollo. Business orders for that configuration are anticipated to start in late first quarter 2026, in response to the corporate.
Alexander Schmitz, chief government of XELA Robotics, mentioned: “We’ve taken an agnostic method in the direction of the commercialization of our expertise. Our focus has been to develop essentially the most human-like sense of contact and make it accessible to all corporations searching for to reinforce their real-world automation.”
The corporate mentioned its sensors are designed to combine with parallel grippers, adaptive grippers, customized end-effectors, and present robotic palms, decreasing the engineering effort sometimes required so as to add tactile sensing to deployed programs.
XELA Robotics positioned tactile sensing as a key enabling expertise for extra succesful humanoid and industrial robots, notably as automation programs transfer towards dealing with a greater diversity of objects in much less structured environments.
