Sharpa Unveils Autonomous Table Tennis Demo and CraftNet Model at CES 2026

On January 19, 2026, Sharpa announced at CES 2026 that its newly debuted full-body robot, North, had played fully autonomous table tennis rallies with humans for four days, eight hours each day. The company also unveiled CraftNet, an end-to-end hierarchical VTLA (vision, touch, language and action) model designed to enhance fine manipulation. Equipped with Wave, a dexterous robotic hand with 22 degrees of freedom, North completed four fully autonomous demos: robot photography, table tennis rallies, windmill assembly and dealing cards.

The significance is that Sharpa demonstrated fine manipulation—a common challenge for humanoid robots—in four different tasks: photography, windmill assembly, card dealing and table tennis, in fully autonomous demos conducted for four days, eight hours each day. According to the announcement, CraftNet has a two-layer architecture that separates the sense of contact from motion control. It is designed to stabilize tasks requiring more than 30 consecutive steps, such as aligning parts, and the final, tiny positioning adjustments involved in touching an object.