内容摘要
On June 10, the World Economic Forum announced its 2026 Technology Pioneers list. Xense Robotics Technology (Shanghai)…
From seeing the world to manipulating the world
On June 10, the World Economic Forum announced its 2026 Technology Pioneers list. Xense Robotics Technology (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. was selected into the 2026 global Technology Pioneers community, and founder and CEO Ma Daolin will represent the company in World Economic Forum global agenda discussions and innovator community activities.
Founded in 2000, the World Economic Forum Technology Pioneers community targets early-stage to growth-stage technology companies worldwide, focusing on innovative companies that are designing, developing and deploying frontier technologies with the potential to significantly impact business and society.
For Xense, this selection is not only recognition by a global innovation platform, but also signifies that tactile intelligence — a key technology direction for the physical intelligence era — is entering the broader global technology and industry agenda.
Industry Transformation
At a time when large model technology is rapidly proliferating and embodied intelligence is accelerating implementation, the entire robotics industry is facing a critical inflection point: the bottleneck of intelligence relying solely on vision is becoming increasingly evident. Vision can help robots "see the environment and recognize objects," but cannot understand real physical properties such as weight, hardness, friction and deformation, leaving robots able only to "see but not feel, and not perform well," struggling to handle high-precision, high-reliability operation scenarios such as assembly, grinding, flexible grasping and precision manipulation.
Industry consensus is becoming increasingly clear: many robot task failures are not because robots "cannot see," but because machines cannot perceive what happens after contact. If vision intelligence solved the entry-level problem of robot perception, then tactile perception and physical intelligence are the core foundations supporting robots to truly integrate into the real physical world and achieve high-level autonomous operation. Future industrial robots, humanoid robots and various embodied intelligent agents, to enter complex industrial scenarios and human living environments and achieve stable, precise, safe and autonomous physical interaction, will find high-precision, modelable, computable tactile capability an indispensable underlying core capability.
It is precisely based on deep thinking about the underlying logic of the embodied intelligence industry and long-term foresight that Xense Robotics was successfully selected for the World Economic Forum (WEF) Technology Pioneers list. Standing out among a host of frontier technology companies, this heavyweight global honor is not only authoritative recognition of Xense's technology innovation capability, research strength, engineering implementation level and long-term industrial value, but also a global endorsement of the company's long-adhered "touch-first, physical intelligence" technology route.
Most current industry solutions remain at the level of stacking optimization of vision intelligence and general algorithms, and WEF's recognition further proves: the real breakthrough of next-generation embodied intelligence lies in tactile perception and physical understanding. The track Xense has laid out ahead of time and continuously cultivated is precisely the core trend leading the industry's future upgrade.
As one of the world's most authoritative and influential technology innovation selections, the WEF Technology Pioneers has long focused on emerging companies in early-stage to growth-stage with original technology and industrial transformation potential. Past honorees include global benchmark companies such as Google, PayPal and Spotify. This selection means Xense's original technology route, R&D system and implementation capability have gained recognition from a global innovation platform.
Xense has carried a deep academic and engineering heritage since its founding. The company was founded by Ma Daolin, a professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, PhD from Peking University, MIT postdoc, and winner of the only Best Paper Award at ICRA 2021. The core team has long been deeply engaged in robot manipulation, tactile perception and embodied intelligence frontiers. Based on long-term accumulation, Xense proposed the "tactile spatial intelligence" theory early on, and has continuously advanced a full-stack self-developed closed loop from underlying sensor design, tactile data collection, perception algorithms, tactile large models to robot control.
More importantly, Xense has always insisted on landing these capabilities in real scenarios. The company does more than provide tactile sensors; it is committed to building a general tactile foundation for the embodied intelligence era, enabling robots to perceive physical properties, understand contact states, adapt autonomously to complex environments and complete fine manipulation — continuously driving embodied intelligence from the "visual perception era" toward the true "physical intelligence era."
