The digitalisation of the industry hinges on the successful integration of workers with robots. Also important is the use of robots capable of safe operations with minimum amount of robot setup times and costs and increasing shopfloor configuration flexibility. The EU-funded Sestosenso project will develop a new sensing technology from the hardware and up to the cognitive perception and control levels for the next generations of collaborative robots. The technology relies on proximity and tactile sensors embedded in the robot body to provide a unified proxy-tactile perception of the environment, thus controlling the robot’s actions and interactions safely and autonomously. Sestosenso will perform three industrial demonstrations in the fields of automotive industry, logistics, agriculture.