Sharpa's ping-pong playing, blackjack dealing humanoid is working overtime at CES 2026

There were no idle hands at Sharpa's CES booth. The company's humanoid may have been the busiest bot at show, autonomously playing ping-pong, dealing blackjack games and taking selfies with passersby. On display wasn't just the robot and its smarts, but also SharpaWave, a highly dexterous 1:1 scale human hand. The hand has 22 active degrees of freedom, according to the company, allowing for precise and intricate finger movements. It mirrored my gestures as I wiggled my hand in front of its camera, getting everything mostly right, which was honestly pretty cool. Each fingertip contains a minicamera and over 1,000 tactile pixels so it can pick up objects with the appropriate amount of delicateness for the task at hand, like plucking a playing card from a deck and placing it gently on the table. Sharpa's robot was a pretty good ping-pong player, too. We've seen ping-pong robots plenty of times before, but these typically come in the form of a disembodied robotic arm, not one that's humanoid from the waist up. The company's products are meant to be general-purpose, with the ability to handle a wide range of jobs, and its humanoid wore a lot of hats at CES to drive the point home.  This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/sharpas-ping-pong-playing-blackjack-dealing-humanoid-is-working-overtime-at-ces-2026-150000488.html?src=rss