Our work, recently highlighted by Cambridge Enterprise, marks a major milestone in robotics by solving one of the industry's longest-standing hardware bottlenecks: the sense of touch. While modern robots excel at visual perception, they heavily lack tactile intelligence. This means robotic grippers often struggle to handle delicate or irregularly shaped objects safely, frequently applying too much force or letting items slip. To bridge this critical gap, our group, the TERN team at the Cambridge Graphene Centre, have engineered a microscopic, high-precision tactile sensor that gives robotic hands unprecedented dexterity.
The breakthrough, which was recently published in Nature Materials, utilizes a sponge-like composite of graphene, liquid metal and aligned nickel particles molded into tiny pyramids. This architecture replicates the natural structure of human skin but with a massive performance upgrade. The sensor features a spatial resolution of 0.2 millimeters, ten times sharper than a human fingertip, giving it the sensitivity to detect something as small as a single grain of sand. Crucially, it can instantly differentiate between regular gripping force and the subtle friction of an object beginning to slide.
Now patented through Cambridge Enterprise ahead of a commercial university spinout, the team aims to deploy these sensors as a seamless, plug-and-play upgrade for existing robotic fingers. Because the technology is compact and highly scalable, it holds massive potential for fields where delicate handling is a necessity. Immediate applications include advanced prosthetics, minimally invasive surgical tools, safe human-robot interactions in eldercare and automated agricultural systems that can harvest fragile crops without causing damage.
You can read the full interview and view lab details on the Cambridge Enterprise website.
