At the 2026 World Robot Expo (WRC), held from August 19-23 at the Beijing Yichuang International Convention and Exhibition Center, a special session on AI large models empowering robotics and embodied intelligence industries took place alongside the main event. Lai Jiancheng, founder and CEO of Tujian Technology, delivered a presentation on the company's work in flexible electronic skin technology, sharing insights into how tactile sensing is reshaping robot capabilities.

Lai emphasized that the core mission of Tujian Technology is to transfer human tactile perception to robots, allowing them to better learn how humans operate, live, and interact with society. The company has pursued this vision since its founding in 2023 when Lai returned from Stanford University, driven by a fundamental observation: when humans perform tasks, they constantly need physical contact with the environment, and touch serves as a critical interface for operation. For robots, achieving stable manipulation and precise handling remains challenging, largely because tactile sensing has not been effectively integrated or is entirely absent in many current systems.

In the company's view, touch is the most critical component of perception, control, and feedback loops. The key challenge lies not merely in installing sensors, but in making tactile information understandable to AI systems. Rather than treating touch as individual pixels, Tujian Technology advocates for tokenizing tactile data so that embodied intelligence can comprehend it meaningfully. The company has proposed its own framework called VTLA to integrate touch into the broader AI ecosystem, positioning this approach as essential for future robotics development.

The company maintains an optimistic outlook on embodied intelligence, believing that robots will eventually enter homes and daily life. To make this possible, Tujian Technology is developing full-body tactile systems, covering not only hands but also arms and other body areas, ensuring robots can operate safely, nimbly, and accurately. The company defines a quality tactile system through two major dimensions: first, the hardware must deliver sensitive, uniform, and multimodal sensing; second, because much training data originates from humans, the sensor design must closely mimic human skin logic. Their electronic skin wraps around the hand in three dimensions, accurately representing interface information and enabling AI to understand spatial coordinates of contact position and depth.

At the company's booth in area D2, position D507, visitors can experience demonstrations of full upper-body tactile coverage on robots. Tujian Technology aims to show what electronic skin can achieve, with products that are soft, elastic, and similar to human skin, yet more durable, resistant to extreme temperatures, and capable of capturing richer information including temperature and pressure in a stretchable, multimodal format.

The electronic skin field represents a deeply interdisciplinary technical domain, spanning from chemical materials through device engineering, circuits, and finally AI applications. Tujian Technology currently employs approximately 100 people, with a leadership team including co-founder and COO Dong, along with chief and deputy chief engineers. Together, they cover materials, devices, circuits, and algorithms internally. The company will release a new tactile glove product at an upcoming press event, and all standardized products on display at the booth are available for hands-on testing.

The company approaches technical development with rigorous engineering discipline, breaking down the electronic skin stack into materials, devices, circuits, and algorithms. The most fundamental layer remains materials and device fabrication, and Tujian Technology maintains a strong team focused on underlying R&D to ensure a steady pipeline of quality products over the next five to ten years. The company develops its own paste and material systems, integrates proprietary processes, builds multimodal electronic skin, and combines these with custom algorithms to serve the embodied intelligence industry and touch-interaction fields including automotive, human posture monitoring (sitting, standing, lying), emotion-related applications, and wearables.

Their products achieve industry-leading specifications, with up to 400 sensors per square meter. The electronic skin can detect temperature and pressure simultaneously, and visitors to the booth can even use it to play mahjong, demonstrating its fine manipulation capabilities. The flexible, stretchable design better incorporates human skin characteristics into the device, improving durability and enabling superior curved surface adhesion. The company has also added self-healing functionality to enhance robustness at the principle level.

Tujian Technology's business focus spans four areas: embodied robots, intelligent cockpits, smart living, and smart companionship. For embodied robots, the company provides complete hardware solutions including tactile sensing for palms, fingers, and each knuckle, plus anti-collision sensing for arms and body. By fusing proximity sensing with pressure sensors in a dual-modal approach, the system can both prevent collisions and detect contact. To help robots learn how to use tactile feedback, the company has built a complete ecosystem chain including data collection tools, tactile gloves, and other capture devices for various interaction scenarios, generating datasets that feed into AI models to improve robot performance.

The company has developed advanced capabilities including normal force sensing, shear force sensing, proximity detection, and high-density arrays. Their systems can clearly distinguish the difference between tasks performed with and without tactile feedback, demonstrating how touch enables better task completion. By deploying sensors on robotic end-effectors, robots can perceive softness, hardness, and shape through touch alone, even without visual input, while vision integration further enhances overall performance. More advanced work includes tactile spatial mapping, mechanism-response fusion, and expanded spatial point clouds for material recognition, contour reconstruction, and slip response detection.

A key achievement is the tactile sensing glove that captures human hand manipulation data with high-density full coverage and no signal interference. The glove supports both wired and wireless multimodal operation, including air-grab video signal integration with pressure and other sensor data, enabling one-to-one matching between human demonstration data and robot tactile perception through collection, alignment, training, and deployment phases.

Beyond robotics, Tujian Technology applies tactile technology to automotive interiors including steering wheels, smart surfaces, and seats. Smart seats can detect occupant posture, estimate weight and height, and optimize comfort by sensing contact pressure distribution and temperature across all interface points. These systems make vehicle interiors more intelligent and improve human-machine interaction. The company also develops products serving human postures including standing, sitting, and lying, making people more comfortable while simultaneously collecting data that AI and embodied intelligence systems can understand for future robotics applications.

Founded in August 2023 after the team's return from Stanford, Tujian Technology has grown over the past three years, undertaking a national key R&D program. The company operates its headquarters in Beijing, a wholly-owned subsidiary serving as a southern base in Shenzhen, and a frontier technology research center in Silicon Valley. With approximately 100 employees, the company continues to recruit talent and pursue partnerships across industry and academia, exploring new applications for tactile sensing technology. Interested parties can follow the company's official public account or contact staff at their booth for more information.