Soft Robot Handles Tofu and Peels Shrimp

A robotic arm equipped with soft tactile sensing is pushing food automation into precision handling. From fragile tofu gripping to crawfish peeling, the system demonstrates adaptive force control that enables both delicate and high-resistance processing tasks on a single platform.

At the 2026 Beijing International Science Fiction and Future Industries Expo, a smart robotic arm with soft tactile sensors drew significant attention during live demonstrations.

In public tests, the system successfully gripped soft tofu without damage and precisely separated crawfish heads and tails—highlighting a major shift from conventional heavy-duty automation toward real-time sensing and adaptive manipulation.

Live Demo: One Robotic Arm, Both "Soft" and "Hard" Tasks

According to on-site staff, the core capability lies in the integrated soft tactile sensing system.

• When facing fragile tofu, the arm's sensors instantly detect the object's softness and automatically reduce gripping force to achieve damage-free handling.
• When handling crawfish — hard-shelled but with soft flesh — the arm applies sufficient force to quickly separate the head and tail.

This means the same piece of equipment can seamlessly switch between "gentle" and "firm" modes, simultaneously handling two traditionally incompatible categories of tasks: soft materials (tofu, tomatoes, cakes) and hard-shelled aquatic products (crawfish, shrimp, crabs).

Technological Breakthrough: Soft Tactile Sensors Give Robotic Arms "Electronic Skin"

Traditional rigid grippers rely on preset programs to control force, struggling to balance the trade-off between applying too much force (causing damage) and too little force (failing to secure the object). Soft tactile sensors change this paradigm.

The technology uses elastic material deformation to sense contact force distribution, feeding real-time data back to the control system for adaptive force control. This "sense–decide–act" closed-loop control enables robotic arms to adjust operating force based on object characteristics —a critical step for soft robotics moving from "functional implementation" to "precision operation."

Industry Value: Solving Two Core Pain Points in Food Processing Automation

In the food processing and seafood processing industries, the following two types of operations have long been considered automation's difficult problem:

• Fragile ingredient handling: tofu, jelly, cakes, cooked fruits and vegetables — requiring extremely low gripping force and uniform contact surface;
• Slippery / irregular ingredient handling: shrimp, fish, meat — requiring sufficient holding force without damaging texture.

Soft tactile sensing technology offers a unified solution to these pain points. When the same equipment can handle both soft and hard ingredients, production line flexibility improves significantly—manufacturers no longer need multiple dedicated equipment sets for different product categories, enabling faster changeovers, higher equipment utilization, and shorter return on investment cycles.

Latest Update: Official Launch at the 2026 Qianjiang Crawfish Festival

The crawfish-peeling robotic arm is expected to be officially introduced at the 2026 Qianjiang Crawfish Festival, a key industry event in China’s seafood sector.This transition from exhibition demonstration to industry deployment indicates that the technology is moving toward practical adoption. For buyers in food processing, seafood processing, and prepared food manufacturing, it represents an emerging solution for flexible, high-precision automation.