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Woven Fiber Electronic Skin For Robots
Holy…S😳
— CyberRobo (@CyberRobooo) March 15, 2026
This isn’t fabric.
It’s electronic skin,woven with dense fiber and textile sensors that can detect pressure, touch, deformation, and subtle contact changes in real time.
Now imagine humanoid robots covered in it,especially on dexterous hands.
humanoids could truly… pic.twitter.com/S3igxxGOt2
It’s electronic skin, woven with dense fiber and textile sensors that can detect pressure, touch, deformation, and subtle contact changes in real time.Now imagine humanoid robots covered in it, especially on dexterous hands.
Humanoids could truly touch and understand the physical world and even humans.
Here's a good description of this new technology from Mike Kalil:
The Chinese company JQ Industries just introduced a fabric-based electronic skin (e-skin) to give robots a humanlike sense of touch. Made from plant-derived materials, it behaves like fabric and can bend and conform like clothing without restricting movement. So basically, Lululemon with embedded sensors.The skin is woven with conductive fibers that detect pressure, contact and force distribution. The system uses sensor gloves for the hands and pressure-sensing soles for the feet. The E-skin acts as a distributed nervous system. It transmits data from thousands of sensing points to the robot’s artificial intelligence for instant decision-making. It integrates with simulation environments like NVIDIA Isaac Sim and MuJoCo for training AI models using tactile feedback
See also this earlier work on combining weaving and technology Weaving a Second Skin: Exploring Opportunities for Crafting On-Skin Interfaces Through Weaving:
Weaving as a craft possesses the structural, textural, aesthetic, and cultural expressiveness for creating a diversity of soft, wearable forms that are capable of technological integration. In this paper, we extend the woven practice for crafting onskin interfaces, exploring the potential to "weave a second skin." Weaving incorporates circuitry in the textile structure, which, when extended to on-skin interface fabrication, allows for electrical connections between layers while maintaining a slim form. Weaving also supports multi-materials integration in the structure itself, offering richer materiality for on-skin devices. We present the results of extensive design experiments that form a design space for adapting weaving for on-skin interface fabrication.
I can think of several sfnal references, one early and one more descriptive:
The marvelous mechanisms were housed in a body like a Greek god’s, the covering of which was made from an elastic, tinted material that had all the feel and appearance of human flesh and epidermis.
(From robot skin covering from Rex (1934) by Harl Vincent)
The other is the radar mesentery from This Immortal (1965) by Roger Zelazny.
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