WEART at the World Robot Conference:
bringing the power of touch to China
This August, WEART co-founder Domenico Prattichizzo travelled to Beijing to speak at the 2026 World Robot Conference, bringing WEART’s expertise in haptics and telerobotics to one of the world’s most dynamic robotics ecosystems.
The event also gave Chinese researchers and companies the opportunity to experience TouchDIVER Pro first-hand, highlighting the growing role of tactile feedback in the development of humanoid robots.
Full haptic feedback: bringing touch to robotics
At the World Robot Conference, WEART co-founder Domenico Prattichizzo brought a key question to the discussion around humanoid robotics: how can robots interact with the physical world if they cannot communicate what they feel? Through TouchDIVER Pro, he showed how force, texture and thermal feedback can give operators access to the tactile information a robot encounters.
His presence also gave the Chinese robotics community the opportunity to experience these capabilities first-hand, making TouchDIVER Pro and WEART’s approach to haptics more visible in one of the world’s fastest-growing robotics ecosystems. It highlighted a shift from robots that simply see and act to robots whose interactions can also be felt, understood and learned from.
Teleoperation and robot training
Building on Prattichizzo’s presentation, the potential of touch becomes particularly clear in teleoperation, where tactile feedback connects the robot’s physical interaction directly to the human operator. In a demonstration with a Unitree humanoid robot, the operator controls the robot’s fingers while receiving tactile feedback from its hand.
As the robot grasps an object, sensors capture the forces involved and transmit them to the glove, allowing the operator to feel how the object responds. This not only improves control, but also creates richer data for robot training, capturing both an expert’s movements and the tactile information behind them.
The World Robot Conference marked an important step for WEART in China, bringing TouchDIVER Pro and its full tactile capabilities to a community at the forefront of humanoid robotics.
As robots learn to see and move with increasing autonomy, WEART is bringing another essential sense into the equation: touch.