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Tactile skin for robots that doesn’t blind itself when it grabs a steel bolt.

XELA announced two upgrades on April 29 ahead of the Boston Robotics Summit. uSkin is a 3-axis (Fx/Fy/Fz) hall-effect tactile sensor that wraps around robot fingers and palms. Each taxel is 7×7.5×4.7mm, picks up forces down to 0.1 gram-force, samples at 125–500Hz.

Why this update matters

Magnetic tactile sensors have one classic failure mode: bring them near iron parts or magnetic clips and the readings go to garbage. Inconvenient if you’re a humanoid working a steel-stamping line. v2’s magnetic-interference compensation kills that problem — sensors stay accurate even with strong magnets nearly touching the skin. CAN FD pushes 8 Mbps in 64-byte frames, so more taxels chain on one bus without dropping rate. CAN FD units start shipping in May; magnetic compensation lands in Q3 2026.

Wiring it into a policy

Streams per-taxel force vectors over CAN FD or USB. ROS2 drivers live on GitHub, plus a C/Python SDK. Drop the topic into a LeRobot loop or custom MCU firmware and you’ve got VLA-ready manipulation input. Already integrated into the Tesollo DG-5F five-fingered hand — 12 sensing points per fingertip in a 21mm-tall package.

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