Samsung Tests 0.5mm Electronic Skin on Humanoid Robot Hands

A 0.5mm-thick pressure-sensing film is now running on Samsung Electronics' humanoid robot hand, and the company behind it says production starts next year. Midas H&T, the Korean startup that makes the so-called electronic skin, announced the tests on the 10th at the 2026 C-Lab Startup Demo Day, held at Samsung's Seoul R&D Campus in Umyeon-dong, Seocho-gu.

The problem the film attacks is old and stubborn. Grip a tomato too hard and you crush it; grip too lightly and you can't lift it at all. Humans solve this with fingertip touch, adjusting force mid-grip. Robots don't — and that gap between raw power and fine force control remains, in Samsung's framing, a major obstacle to commercializing humanoids.

For practitioners building manipulation stacks, this is where the story bites.

What does the electronic skin actually do?

The core material is thermoplastic polyurethane — TPU — formed into a stretchable film with pressure sensors distributed across its surface. Apply heat and the film clings to the contours of a robot's fingers, roughly like a protective film going onto a car body panel. Once fitted, any object touching the skin registers at the sensor level, giving the robot two things it usually lacks: where contact happens and how much pressure it's applying.

At half a millimeter, the film sits in the range where thickness starts to matter for tight-clearance work. Chang Se-yoon, chief executive of Midas H&T, said it's thin enough for precision parts assembly processes where working space is limited.

The attachment geometry varies by application, according to Chang. Options include:

• wrapping the film along finger contours
• attaching it to the palm to register contact point and grip pressure
• producing it in glove form that fits over the entire robot hand

Samsung is reportedly going with the glove format for its current development hardware.

How does the grip loop close?

In the tomato example Samsung's engineers use, the glove-form skin detects pressure changes from the instant a finger touches the object. Once the fingers' pressure on the tomato hits a preset level, the sensor signals feed the motors and stop the grip from tightening further. The pressure data travels to the robot's control system, which then tunes grip force continuously.

That's a closed tactile loop rather than the open-loop approximations most robot grippers rely on today.

Can it stack with existing sensors?

Yes, and that's where the precision gains compound. Chang outlined a hybrid setup: a camera and a distance-measuring sensor mounted on the robot hand identify an object's position, while electronic skin on the palm measures the actual pressure of the grip. Position data plus contact data means more precise manipulation than either sensor class delivers alone.

Chang also proposed layering electronic skin over existing sensors — stacking tactile sensing on top of what's already in the hand, roughly the way human skin layers its own sensing functions.

Who's building it, and when?

Midas H&T specializes in electronic skin and is part of C-Lab Outside, Samsung's external startup program. Performance verification is happening with Samsung's RX Business Development Office — the robotics unit that reports directly to the chief executive, which tells you where the project sits in Samsung's internal priorities.

The commercial timeline is concrete. "We are building the supply chain needed to manufacture electronic skin so that we can begin production next year," Chang said. That's the number to watch: if the supply chain comes together on schedule, a tactile layer built for a humanoid program with CEO-level sponsorship could reach component availability at production scale within roughly a year of the demo.

For integrators, the takeaway is straightforward. The grip-control gap has been a hardware problem waiting for a sensor format that survives real contact — stretchable, heat-applied, and thin enough not to eat clearance budgets. A 0.5mm glove that reports contact location and pressure gives control engineers the feedback signal they've been approximating with vision and current draw. Whether Midas H&T's film holds up at volume is next year's question; Samsung's robot hand is already asking it.