Author: Zihao
As emerging industries such as smart manufacturing, smart vehicles, humanoid robots, IoT (Internet of Things), and the low-altitude economy continue to rise, sensors, serving as the underlying sensory nerves for the interaction between the physical and digital worlds, are seeing continuous market expansion. The entire sensor industry has officially entered a new stage of high-quality iteration. From the perspective of the overall industry, Mordor Intelligence data shows that the global sensor market is advancing from USD 244.31 billion in 2025 to USD 269.43 billion in 2026, with a compound growth rate of 10.29% from 2026 to 2031. In the Chinese market, CCID Consulting data shows that the market size of China's sensors reached CNY 470 billion in 2025, and is expected to grow at an annual rate of 15% during the "15th Five-Year Plan" period, aiming to hit the trillion-yuan mark by 2030. As one of the world's top three professional sensor exhibitions, SENSOR CHINA is rooted in local manufacturing and application needs. Over the past 10 years, it has continuously introduced international technology and market resources, establishing substantive connections beyond the exhibition cycle between supply and demand.
The recently held SENSOR CHINA 2026, as the annual core industry event in the field of domestic sensing and intelligent perception, has entered a new decade cycle. The exhibition area reaches 30,000 square meters, gathering over 600 domestic and overseas industry chain enterprises to participate. It is expected to attract more than 40,000 visitors from fields such as automobiles, robotics, industrial automation, commercial aerospace, and semiconductor equipment for communication and negotiation. The most prominent feature of this exhibition is the transformation of sensing technology towards multi-modal fusion, system-level solution delivery, and in-depth implementation in vertical scenarios. Domestic and overseas manufacturers compete on the same stage, engaging in technical competition around emerging tracks such as embodied intelligence, physical AI, commercial aerospace, computing center monitoring, and high-end medical care. It also concentrates on showcasing the continuous progress of the domestic sensor industry in engineering implementation and multi-scenario adaptation capabilities.
Bionic Perception Opens a New World for Embodied Intelligence, Bringing Robot Technology to Daily Life Scenarios
Embodied intelligence is undoubtedly the hottest main track at this SENSOR CHINA. According to the "Guidelines for the Construction of the National Humanoid Robot Industry Standard System (2026 Edition)" (Draft for Comments) released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology on August 25, the humanoid robot industry chain covers large and small brains, joints and dexterous hands, sensors, intelligent computing systems, training and data, etc.; in the standard framework, requirements for various sensors such as vision, force, and touch are classified into the perception module standards under the major category of "limbs and components", specifying the sensor integration, perception accuracy, reliability, and testing methods. At the opening ceremony of SENSOR CHINA 2026, the "2026 Embodied Intelligent Robot Sensor White Paper" was simultaneously released, systematically sorting out the technical indicator requirements, engineering difficulties, and industrialization paths of sensing devices such as touch, force, inertia, and smell, providing a reference basis for the entire robot perception industry.
For humanoid robots to perform fine movements such as grasping, assembly, human-machine interaction, and specific environment surveying, sensors are the core carriers for physical interaction. Multi-dimensional force sensors, flexible tactile arrays, electronic noses, and high-precision IMUs (Inertial Measurement Units) together constitute the robot's "five senses and skin", becoming the core areas that major manufacturers focus on tackling.
Hanwei Technology is the core benchmark enterprise in the robot track of this exhibition. Relying on its professional subsidiaries to deeply cultivate the field of robot bionic perception, it has achieved complete coverage of the robot's five senses, with a very complete product system. Unlike single-category device manufacturers, Hanwei Technology this time concentrates on exhibiting robot intelligent data gloves, electronic nose olfactory sensing, whole-body electronic skin tactile sensing, fingertip high-precision pressure sensing, and robot joint six-dimensional force sensing chips. These can fully adapt to core scenarios such as humanoid robot environment recognition, fine grasping, joint torque monitoring, and human-machine safe interaction, completely building a robot bionic perception hardware system. It is also one of the few enterprises at this exhibition that can achieve "full coverage of the robot's five senses".
The main electronic skin tactile sensing products exhibited by Hanwei Technology this time were developed by its subsidiary Suzhou Newsda Electronic Technology Co., Ltd. They use flexible pressure sensing technology to print flexible nano-functional materials with strong adhesion, bending resistance, and high sensitivity on flexible and thin materials, making them thin-film sensors that achieve high-sensitivity pressure detection.
JQ Industries, on the other hand, innovatively weaves and embeds sensing units directly into fiber wires, ultimately forming directly applicable flexible fiber sensors. This fiber-textured pressure sensing product has the advantages of better flexibility, stronger fit, and large-area coverage. It can perfectly adapt to scenarios such as full-body skin perception and flexible wearable detection for robots, providing a lightweight and highly adaptable new solution for robot flexible perception and enriching the industry's technical routes.
Notably, the flexible sensing technologies of both companies have been simultaneously expanded to application scenarios such as smart vehicles, medical and elderly care, and home elderly care. For example, at the exhibition site, it can be seen that both companies have deployed flexible plantar pressure sensing solutions. By collecting full-area pressure data from the soles of the feet, they can accurately analyze human walking posture, force distribution, and gait stability. In the field of medical rehabilitation, this technology can screen abnormal walking postures and postural imbalance problems in advance, and achieve early intervention and auxiliary rehabilitation for risks such as early diabetic foot lesions, foot pressure injuries, and unstable gait in the middle-aged and elderly, providing new hardware support for chronic disease care, elderly rehabilitation, and home health monitoring. Meanwhile, the smart mattress non-contact monitoring solution is also a major highlight in the health and elderly care sensor track at this exhibition. Its entire smart care mattress system is built with a high-density fiber sensor array. Without wearing any devices, it can continuously collect subtle data such as human body pressure distribution, sleeping posture, and body movements 24 hours a day, achieving full-dimensional smart care through a supporting APP and backend system. The functions are extremely comprehensive, automatically completing bed pressure assessment, turning frequency statistics, turning timeout warnings, and bedsore risk prediction. At the same time, it accurately monitors breathing, heart rate, sleeping posture, and the risk of leaving or falling out of bed, and automatically generates sleep quality analysis reports and standardized care plans, with real-time alarm push for abnormal situations.
This solution is particularly suitable for nursing homes, rehabilitation hospitals, and home care scenarios for disabled elderly people. It can greatly reduce the pressure of manual nursing, quantify nursing quality, and avoid the risk of bedridden complications. Cutting-edge bionic sensing technology is no longer confined to robot laboratories, but is gradually moving towards civilian universal implementation.
Vehicle-Mounted Sensing Cultivates Real-World Demands, Seeking a Two-Way Balance Between Safety and Cost Reduction
Smart vehicles remain the core main track with the most concentrated enterprise layout and the most mature implementation at this exhibition, and also the most solid market base of the sensor industry. Automotive-grade sensing has strict requirements for stability, anti-interference, and accuracy consistency. After years of iteration, domestic leading manufacturers have deeply adapted to the needs of vehicle-mounted scenarios, forming a mature product system and implementation model.
Novosense focuses on the sensing and control needs in applications such as automobiles, industrial control, robotics, and wearable medical devices, concentrating on displaying various sensing and real-time control products, with a focus on bringing new products such as automotive-grade pressure sensors, robot angle encoders, and electrochemical sensor AFEs. In the first half of 2026, Novosense's sensor revenue reached CNY 643 million, a year-on-year increase of 55.63%. The Yole Group magnetic sensor report shows that Novosense ranks fourth globally and first among domestic brands in shipment volume.
In terms of application fields, Novosense has been deeply cultivating automotive electronics for more than ten years, with products covering the three electric systems of automobiles, body control and lighting, intelligent driving, intelligent cockpit, chassis and safety, etc. As of the first half of 2026, the cumulative shipment of automotive electronics reached 1.952 billion units, making it a leading domestic automotive analog chip company. In the field of wearable medical devices, Novosense recently launched the NSA1080. This is a dedicated electrochemical sensor AFE chip for continuous glucose monitoring (CGM), supporting dual-parameter monitoring of blood glucose and ketones.
At this SENSOR CHINA exhibition, SENASIC, with the core positioning of "being committed to becoming the sensing and computing entry point for Physical AI to land in the physical world at the edge", showcased its wireless BMS edge intelligent chip solution for single-cell intelligence, promoting the evolution of battery management from centralized data collection to single-cell distributed perception and intelligent management.
This solution is centered on "one chip, one management", configuring an independent intelligent chip for each cell, and sinking the perception and wireless communication capabilities to the cell end. By monitoring key parameters of a single cell such as voltage, temperature, and EIS (Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy), it provides more refined data support for battery state evaluation, anomaly identification, and fault location, helping the battery system optimize safety warning and management strategies. On this basis, it faces the practical implementation of the Battery Passport. The independent identity identification and continuous data accumulation of a single cell can also provide support for the full life cycle traceability of the cell from production, operation to retirement and cascade utilization, allowing battery management to extend from mastering the current state to further understanding the usage history and health changes of a single cell, providing a data foundation for battery passports, residual value evaluation, and cascade utilization.
Hu Chenguang, Marketing Director of SENASIC, stated: "This solution has been recognized by various leading battery manufacturers. Facing application scenarios such as power batteries, energy storage, and drones, SENASIC will continue to promote solution development and application verification, providing support for more refined and intelligent battery management."
Emerging Tracks Bloom in Multiple Points, Medical and Aerospace Fields Open New Space for Industrial Growth
On the basis of the continuous consolidation of the industrial and automotive tracks, precision medical sensing and commercial aerospace special sensing have become the two completely new incremental tracks at this exhibition. Miniaturization, high reliability, and extreme environment adaptation have become technical keywords, opening up new market space for domestic sensor enterprises.
Precision medical sensing has become a completely new incremental field that international manufacturers focus on exploring at this exhibition. It mainly features miniaturized, high-precision, and highly adaptable dedicated sensing solutions, focusing on high-end medical equipment and minimally invasive diagnosis and treatment scenarios.
As an old international sensing enterprise, TE Connectivity focuses on the medical sensing track at this exhibition, exhibiting a variety of miniaturized precision sensing products, breaking the public's inherent perception of it mainly focusing on industrial and vehicle-mounted sensing. Its medical sensing products are extremely small in size and can accurately monitor subtle parameters such as human blood flow pressure and infusion fluid flow rate. They can be widely adapted to high-end medical scenarios such as minimally invasive surgery, endoscopic diagnosis and treatment, and precise physiological saline infusion. They can complete high-precision data collection in the narrow space of medical equipment, adapting to the development trend of modern minimally invasive and precision medicine. At the same time, TE Connectivity's traditional advantageous industrial sensing and vehicle-mounted sensing products are still fully exhibited, forming a "industry + automotive + medical" trinity product layout, among which the medical track has become a new growth direction that it focuses on promoting and expanding at this exhibition.
Honeywell, also an old international enterprise, continues its steady development strategy. Relying on its profound technical accumulation and mature market share, it does not blindly follow the trend of expanding in emerging tracks, but always focuses on deepening and refining its own advantageous fields. At this exhibition, its core exhibits are concentrated in five traditional advantageous sectors: industrial automation, automotive electronics, energy monitoring, medical sensing, and semiconductor manufacturing. Relying on stable product performance, a complete industrial/automotive-grade certification system, and long-term accumulated industry reputation, it continues to consolidate its market base in high-end industrial, semiconductor manufacturing, and energy fields, demonstrating the steady and pragmatic layout thinking of a leading old enterprise, and still possessing irreplaceable competitive advantages in the mature high-end sensor track.
With the rapid development of the commercial aerospace industry, the maturity of reusable rocket technology, the batch networking of satellite IoT, and the steady promotion of the large aircraft industry, a large number of special sensor demands are spawned. The space and high-altitude environments have extreme working conditions such as severe temperature differences, strong vibrations, and strong radiation, which put forward extremely high requirements for the stability and anti-interference ability of sensors.
ZITN Microelectronics brings rocket telemetry series sensors and transducers. It is not only a national-level specialized, refined, differential, and innovation "little giant" enterprise, but also one of the few private sensor enterprises in China that can support the Long March series rockets for more than 100 times. Over the years, relying on the core competitive advantages established by the four major technical characteristics of ultra-high temperature, ultra-low temperature, high precision, and high reliability, it has maintained long-term and stable cooperative relations with many key national aerospace units; Gova Technology exhibits aerospace-grade high-reliability special sensors, adapting to extreme environment perception of aerospace equipment; Xdlk Microsystem's MEMS inertial devices can be used for satellite and rocket attitude measurement and navigation; Longwei Technology and Siwei Technology's MEMS pressure sensors cover high-end equipment scenarios such as aviation and industrial measurement and control. In the past, the commercial aerospace field relied heavily on high-cost customized devices. As the industry develops to the current stage, cost reduction and batch delivery have become industrial demands. This also opens up new market space for domestic enterprises with special sensing R&D capabilities.
Five Major Trends in the Development of the Sensor Industry
After visiting major exhibiting enterprises and comparing the iteration of full-category exhibits, we can clearly feel that the overall development logic of the global sensor industry this year has ushered in a clear turning point. At this exhibition, foreign giants steadily cultivate high-end advantageous tracks, while local enterprises accelerate technological innovation and scenario implementation. Chinese and foreign enterprises compete on the same stage and deploy differentiated layouts, jointly outlining a brand new development pattern for the industry, and also reflecting five core new industrial trends:
First, industry competition becomes pragmatic, and the value of scenario implementation surpasses the involution of hardware parameters. This year, all mainstream exhibiting brands have focused their product polishing efforts on real scenario pain points. Guo Yuansheng, Deputy Director of the Science and Technology Committee of the Central Committee of the Jiusan Society and Academician of the National Academy of Artificial Intelligence, stated that for a long time, there has been a significant disconnect between production and sales in the sensor industry. The R&D end focuses on device iteration, while the application end urgently needs plug-and-play intelligent perception capabilities. Therefore, he proposed the core principle of "no project without scenarios, no acceptance without applications". This concept also completely fits the trend of this exhibition. The current market core competitiveness is no longer extreme hardware parameters, but scenario adaptation capabilities, system integration capabilities, and implementation delivery capabilities. Overall solutions that can help customers reduce costs and increase efficiency and shorten development cycles have become the mainstream competitive barriers in the industry.
Second, AI technology is deeply implemented, and sensors achieve a qualitative change from data collection to environmental cognition. The most intuitive industry upgrade at this exhibition is that AI gets rid of marketing gimmicks and deeply integrates into the underlying R&D and product design of sensing hardware. Domestic and overseas exhibiting enterprises are all stepping up multi-modal fusion, edge computing, and local intelligent decision-making technologies, rewriting the product positioning of traditional sensors. Zhang Rujing, founder of Xinghuachip (Shaoxing) Semiconductor Technology Co., Ltd. and founder and chief consultant of Hainan Hangxin High-Tech Industry Group Co., Ltd., clearly pointed out at the opening ceremony that the core support of the AI industry is not only various computing chips, but the multi-dimensional physical perception capability built by sensors is the core foundation for artificial intelligence to connect with the real world. It can extend multi-dimensional perception capabilities beyond human five senses, which is a key prerequisite for the landing of physical AI. At the same time, Gu Min, a foreign academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, executive chairman of the University Council of the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, and president of the Institute of Photonic Chips, brought optical brain-like intelligent technology, which also verified the new iteration direction of the industry. By using photonic carriers to break through the energy consumption and speed bottlenecks of traditional electronic architectures, and relying on brain-like computing and computing-storage integration technologies, sensors are upgraded from passive data collection hardware tools to cognitive units with environmental recognition, state judgment, and intelligent decision-making.
Third, the cooling and heating of tracks is clearly differentiated, and new and old tracks are simultaneously upgraded in quality. Emerging tracks such as humanoid robots and high-end medical and elderly care have seen explosive growth in popularity. Enterprises are flocking to layout cutting-edge technologies such as multi-modal perception, flexible sensing, and precision minimally invasive perception, with extremely fast iteration speeds; while traditional advantageous tracks such as automobiles, industry, and energy focus on deepening and optimizing core dimensions such as safety upgrades, refined monitoring, long-term stability, and working condition adaptation. Overall, AI empowerment makes sensors a rigid basic hardware for the intelligent industry. Whether it is an emerging track or a traditional track, the number of sensors carried, the richness of categories, and the integration density are continuously improving, and the industry as a whole enters a dual-line quality improvement growth cycle.
Fourth, the local industry iterates and upgrades, moving from technological following to systematic independent innovation. Today, local enterprises rely on the massive and diverse terminal application scenarios in China to walk out a differentiated technical route adapted to the local market, forming unique advantages in scenario customization, solution integration, and rapid iteration. Combining ten years of development experience in the semiconductor industry, Zhang Rujing judged that the sensor industry does not need to blindly pursue high-end advanced processes. The perfect capacity and technical accumulation of domestic mature processes can fully support the high-quality development of the industry. After years of upstream and downstream collaborative polishing and terminal scenario actual measurement iteration, the local sensor industry has achieved comprehensive systematic upgrades. At the same time, the industry maintains an open and coordinated development mindset. Under the premise of mastering the initiative of core technologies, it continues to connect with international technical exchanges and cooperation, and the development model is becoming more mature and rational.
Fifth, the in-depth implementation of industry-university-research collaboration, and systematic innovation becomes an industry rigid demand. From the exhibiting lineup and product innovation logic of this exhibition, it is not difficult to see that the R&D model of a single enterprise fighting alone can no longer adapt to the current pace of rapid industry iteration. This exhibition gathers numerous scientific research institutes, innovation platforms, and domestic and overseas industrial enterprises to appear on the same stage, and the industrial atmosphere of the integration of industry-university-research-application is becoming stronger. Chen Wenming, core scientist of Xinzhi Shuneng Technology and researcher at the Institute of Trustworthy Embodied Intelligence of Fudan University, stated that the core breakthrough of future embodied intelligent perception does not lie in the optimization of a single hardware parameter, but in the systematic innovation of multi-modal data fusion, physical cognitive modeling, and industry unified standards. Cutting-edge core technologies such as brain-like perception, multi-modal fusion, and flexible bionic perception all originate from the source innovation of scientific research institutes, and then enterprises complete the engineering, productization, and scenario implementation. The closed-loop collaborative model of institute R&D, enterprise transformation, and terminal verification has become the core driving force for industry technological breakthroughs.
Under the continuous promotion of new quality productive forces, physical AI, embodied intelligence, and the intelligent upgrade of thousands of industries, sensors, as the sensory nerve endings of the intelligence of all things, are continuously releasing industrial value. The core competition focus of the industry in the future will concentrate on more reliable engineering implementation capabilities, more accurate scenario adaptation capabilities, and more complete system integration capabilities. Under the general trend of the intelligent connection of all things, the continuous breakthroughs in perception layer technology will continue to consolidate the underlying hardware foundation for industries such as artificial intelligence and smart manufacturing.