Xsens Launches New 'Link' MoCap Suit to Service Robotics' Data Bottleneck

ENSCHEDE, NL—Xsens, a motion capture brand under Movella, announced the launch of its next-generation Xsens Link motion capture system today. While the redesigned suit targets multiple industries, including entertainment and sports, its launch is squarely aimed at the booming humanoid robotics sector, offering a refined tool for teleoperation and AI data collection.

The announcement comes as the robotics industry grapples with the "physical AI bottleneck"—the critical challenge of teaching robots how to interact with the real world. With leading companies split on data strategies—from Tesla's bet on simulation to Figure's focus on human video —Xsens is positioning the new Link as a high-fidelity solution for the "human-in-the-loop" approach, a strategy also embraced by companies like 1X and recently demonstrated by Unitree.

According to the company's press release, the new Xsens Link is designed to be a "frictionless capture workflow." The system features a redesigned suit using lightweight "4D performance textiles" with integrated, washable cabling. It also includes hot-swappable batteries for "uninterrupted sessions" and uses Wi-Fi 6E for low-latency data streaming.

"We've taken everything our customers love about Xsens and built the next generation around comfort, consistency, and flexibility," said Dennis Kloppenburg, a product manager at Xsens, in the announcement.

A Tool for the Teleoperation Strategy

For robotics developers, the suit itself is only half of the platform. Xsens is pairing the hardware with a dedicated "Xsens Humanoid software" package. The company states this combination "powers the translation of human motion into robot-ready kinematics" for teleoperation, simulation, and AI training.

This directly targets the teleoperation data strategy, where human operators pilot robots to generate the foundational data needed to train autonomous models.

Xsens's website details a software ecosystem designed for this workflow:

• Xsens Humanoid Live: This tier is focused on real-time teleoperation, promising low-latency streaming (around 20ms) to robotics platforms.
• Xsens Humanoid Pro: This version is aimed at data-gathering for machine learning. It adds "HD reprocessing" to create cleaner, more stable motion data sets with lower drift, which can then be exported to ML stacks.

The platform's technical specifications highlight this robotics focus, with native integration for ROS 2, NVIDIA Isaac Sim, and MuJoCo mentioned in the press release.

An Enabling Technology

Xsens is not a robot builder. Like the camera makers supplying data for human-video strategies, Xsens is an enabling technology provider. The company, which already lists Neura Robotics and over 500 universities as partners, is providing a key component for companies betting that direct human teleoperation is the fastest way to teach robots.

The new Xsens Link, with its focus on comfort, minimal maintenance, and clean data output, appears to be a direct bid to become the "gold-standard" data-gathering tool for the growing number of companies pursuing a teleoperation or sim-to-real hybrid strategy.

"With this new generation of Xsens Link, we're delivering a platform that spans industries," said Movella CEO Eric Salzman. "We're enabling robotic engineers... to push the boundaries of how human motion informs digital innovation."