# Columbia's Yunzhu Li team presents FlexiTac open-source tactile sensor progress at IROS 2026

- Source: Leiphone Robotics
- Published: 2026-10-30T08:13:00.000Z
- RoboHot: https://robohot.news/en/items/nt8eqy1mf1b9yv640b2wvxoyo
- Original: https://www.leiphone.com/category/robot/sRmmVes4DwBoIeRm.html

## Summary

At IROS 2026, Columbia University's Yunzhu Li team presented progress on FlexiTac, an open-source flexible piezoresistive tactile sensor platform, a year and a half after its open-source release. The sensor can be assembled in 3 minutes, bent and cut, and wrapped around gloves, fingertips, or robot skin. The team has integrated it into LeRobot and modified the UMI handheld device to add tactile recording, enabling synchronized visual-tactile data collection and policy pretraining. ADI is advancing a commercial version with tactile resolution five times that of a human finger, manufactured at scale using semiconductor fabrication processes.

## Why it matters

From sensor design and simulation calibration to UMI data collection, it presents a complete technical path toward scaling tactile perception.