From fingertips to full-body touch: Ensuring Technology unveils tactile infrastructure for embodied AI at CES 2026

By TechWatch PH Staff

While robots at CES 2026 impressed crowds with fluid movement and expressive performances, one question quietly took center stage on the show floor: when will robots truly be able to feel? 

For Ensuring Technology, the answer lies in touch—and at CES 2026, the Shenzhen-based startup made a strong case that embodied artificial intelligence is entering its next phase.

From January 6 to 9, Ensuring Technology drew sustained attention from robotics experts, media, and industry observers as it introduced a new generation of tactile sensing systems designed to replicate the human sense of touch. 

The company showcased two newly launched products—the ultra-thin, high-density tactile sensor Tacta and the large-area electronic skin solution HexSkin—positioning tactile perception as the missing foundation for robots to move beyond demonstrations and into real-world work.

For years, the multi-dimensional tactile sensor industry has struggled with limitations such as low sampling density, slow response rates, and complex deployment. Tacta was developed to directly address these constraints, particularly in robotic dexterous hands where precision and responsiveness are critical. 

Each square centimeter of Tacta integrates 361 multi-dimensional sensing elements, sampling at up to 1,000 Hz, enabling touch sensitivity comparable to that of humans. Despite this density, the sensor maintains a maximum thickness of just 4.5 millimeters by combining sensing, real-time data decoupling, and edge computing into a single compact module.

At CES 2026, Ensuring Technology demonstrated what full tactile coverage can look like in practice. For the first time, a robotic dexterous hand was entirely wrapped with Tacta sensors, covering fingertips, finger pads, and the palm. 

In total, 1,956 sensing units were deployed on a single hand, effectively forming a human-like tactile network capable of perceiving fine contact, pressure, and interaction across the entire surface.

Beyond hands, Ensuring Technology also addressed the challenge of scaling touch across larger robotic bodies. Its HexSkin electronic skin system is designed for wide-area deployment on complex, curved surfaces such as humanoid robots. 

Using a hexagonal topology with integrated sensing and computing, HexSkin allows seamless tiling over non-uniform shapes—overcoming a key limitation of traditional tactile arrays that struggle with multi-curvature surfaces.

Equally significant is HexSkin’s approach to data handling. Rather than relying on bulky external readout boards and multiplexing, the system adopts a modular, protocol-based communication architecture. This design reduces latency, improves response speed, and simplifies integration, making full-body tactile coverage more practical for real-world robots. Ensuring Technology says this approach brings the cost of outfitting an entire humanoid robot with electronic skin down to the hundred-dollar range, striking a rare balance between performance and affordability.

Founder and chief executive Ningzhe Hou explained that the company’s work is built on a spatially encoded, multi-dimensional piezoresistive sensing approach. 

Beyond compact form factors and integrated computing, the technology is designed for mass production and robustness. 

According to the company, its fingertip sensors can be produced at roughly one-tenth the cost of comparable solutions while remaining resistant to interference from materials, temperature changes, and magnetic fields—an important requirement for deployment outside controlled lab environments.

Looking ahead, Ensuring Technology is positioning itself not just as a hardware supplier, but as a foundational infrastructure builder for embodied intelligence. 

Hou outlined a broader vision that combines mass-producible tactile sensors, a proprietary software toolkit for tactile data acquisition and processing, and a platform for training and generalizing tactile operation models. The goal is to turn touch—long considered invisible and underutilized in robotics—into structured, usable data that robots can learn from and act upon.

Founded in 2025 and headquartered in Shenzhen Bay, Ensuring Technology brings together engineers from leading robotics laboratories and industry veterans. Its CES 2026 showcase signaled a clear ambition: to give robots a sense of touch refined enough to move from impressive showcases to meaningful, productive roles in the real world.