Tactile Sensors for Robots: Ensuring Tech at CES 2026
People now marvel at robots that dance and act, but embodied AI now moves from spectacle to capability. The "ChatGPT" moment for embodied AI robots now draws closer.
How can robots learn to work on their own? People now expect robots to learn like humans and complete tasks without specific training. When will robots perceive, decide, and act like humans? Ensuring Technology offers a clear answer: robots only reach that level when they replicate the human sense of touch.
From January 6th to 9th, Ensuring Technology, a pioneer in embodied intelligent tactile perception, showcased its newly launched tactile sensing products at CES 2026. The line-up included Tacta, an ultra-thin, high-density, computing-integrated multidimensional tactile sensor, and HexSkin, a large-area electronic skin tactile sensor. The display drew strong interest from international experts, media, and attendees.
The multidimensional tactile sensor industry has long struggled with low sampling density, low frequency, and complex deployment. Ensuring Technology engineered Tacta to overcome these limits and answer a core question: how do engineers give robotic dexterous hands human-like tactile perception?
Tacta delivers that capability by integrating 361 multidimensional sensels in 1 cm2 and sampling at 1000Hz. This design provides tactile perception with human-level sensitivity. Tacta also maintains a highly compact form factor, with a maximum thickness of just 4.5mm. It combines sensing, real-time data decoupling, and edge computing in a single module. This design eliminates the need for external processing devices and improves deployability across a wide range of dexterous robotic hands.
At CES, Ensuring Technology demonstrated deployability at scale. The team entirely covered a dexterous hand with Tacta sensors for the first time. They equipped a single hand with 1,956 multidimensional tactile sensels across fingertips, finger pads, and the palm. This full coverage builds a human-like tactile sensing network for robots.
Ensuring Technology also positions HexSkin as an electronic skin that solves two industry problems: deployability and data acquisition. For deployability, the HexSkin series uses a hexagonal topology of sensing-computing-integrated sensels. This design supports seamless tiling and high coverage on complex curved surfaces, including humanoid robots. It also avoids the constraints that limit traditional tactile arrays to single-curvature surfaces.
For data acquisition, the company moved away from the conventional approach of "large-array multiplexing (MUX) with bulky external readout boards." HexSkin instead uses a modular, protocol-based communication architecture. This change cuts latency and improves response speeds compared with traditional systems.
HexSkin also lowers the cost of full-body electronic skin. It now enables teams to cover an entire humanoid robot with electronic skin at a price reduced to the hundred-dollar range. This shift aims to strike a practical balance between high performance and affordability for robotics deployments.
Ningzhe Hou, founder and CEO of Ensuring Technology, said the company built its tactile sensing technology on a "spatially-encoded multidimensional piezoresistance" approach. The company pairs compact dimensions and an ultra-thin profile with an integrated sensing and computing design. It also targets two practical advantages for real-world adoption. Ensuring Technology says it cuts costs sharply and prices the mass-produced fingertip sensor at one-tenth the cost of competing industry solutions. It also prioritises interference resistance, and the sensor remains unaffected by material, temperature, magnetic fields, and other environmental variables. This resilience supports stronger robustness in real applications.
Hou also highlighted a pressing challenge for embodied AI: teams must use tactile data efficiently. He wants to develop Ensuring Technology into a foundational builder of tactile perception infrastructure for embodied intelligence. He frames that ambition as 'Ensuring' the foundation for embodied tactile 'Technology'. He also said the company will introduce a comprehensive tactile sensing infrastructure solution that combines "mass-producible, integrable high-performance tactile sensor hardware + a self-developed software toolkit for tactile data acquisition, decoupling, and algorithms + a platform for tactile operation generalisation, utilisation, and utilisation." He expects this stack to turn "invisible " to visualisable, deployable, and usable data assets. This shift should help robots use tactile data effectively and move from "showing off " to "doing real work."