uSkin

A magnetic tactile skin from XELA Robotics where every sensing point measures both pressure and shear force at once.

uSkin is a tactile sensor product line from XELA Robotics of Japan; XELA was spun out of Waseda University in 2018 and is headquartered in Tokyo. uSkin uses magnetic tactile sensing: when its soft outer layer deforms under force, the magnetic field inside it changes, and a magnetic sensor reads out that change in flux, with each taxel (sensing element) reporting both normal pressure and tangential shear force. It comes in versions that attach to a gripper, a dexterous hand, or any arbitrary surface, and in research it is commonly mounted on the fingertips, knuckles, and palm of an Allegro Hand for slip detection and contact-force estimation. Magnetic signals are hard to interpret and troublesome to calibrate, which is why Sparsh-skin, from Akash Sharma and colleagues in 2025, uses self-supervised learning to train a general-purpose representation for this kind of magnetic hand-skin sensor.

ExampleWith uSkin attached to the fingertips of an Allegro Hand, a sudden change in shear force while grasping a cup signals that the object is about to slip, and the hand immediately grips harder.

Also called

XELA uSkin

Related

Tactile Sensor · Magnetic Tactile Sensing · Electronic Skin · Allegro Hand · Slip Detection · XELA Robotics

Sources

XELA Robotics 官网 (Chinese)
Self-supervised perception for tactile skin covered dexterous hands (Sparsh-skin, arXiv:2505.11420)

As of

2026-09