New Robotic Skin Gives Machines a Human-Like Sense of Touch

Written on 07/07/2025
Nisha Zahid
A new robotic skin gives robots the ability to sense touch more naturally, human-like, opening up uses in medicine, rescue work, prosthetics. Credit: Losttaken Public Domain

Scientists have created a new kind of robotic skin that could allow robots to sense touch in ways that resemble human feeling. This soft, flexible material can detect pressure, temperature, and even damage, marking a significant step toward making robots more responsive and aware of their surroundings.

The newly developed skin is made from a gel-like material that conducts electricity. Researchers shaped it into various forms and attached electrodes to pick up signals from over 860,000 tiny sensing paths. Each one can detect different types of physical contact—such as tapping, squeezing, or heat.

This innovation opens the door for use in a wide range of fields, from healthcare to search-and-rescue operations. Robots equipped with this skin could handle fragile objects more safely or help care for patients where a sense of touch is important. The findings were published in Science Robotics.

Moving toward more human-like robots

One of the most notable benefits of this new material is its simplicity. Traditional robotic skins usually rely on separate sensors for each type of feeling—one for heat, another for pressure, and others for different types of touch. These sensors often interfere with each other, and the rubber-like materials used in older designs tend to tear easily.

This new skin combines those features into one system. A single type of sensor handles various forms of contact, making the skin more durable, easier to manufacture, and less costly. While it’s still difficult to pinpoint the exact cause of each touch signal, researchers say this model shows major improvement over earlier versions.

The gel can also be molded into many shapes, making it adaptable for different kinds of machines. That flexibility could make it a good fit for robots with moving limbs or for prosthetic devices that require a natural sense of touch.

Testing the skin’s sensing ability

To test how well the material worked, researchers melted the gel into the shape of a human hand and connected several types of electrode setups. They then exposed the hand to high heat, finger pressure, robotic touches, and even cuts using a scalpel. The goal was to see how clearly the skin could recognize and react to each type of touch.

Through this testing, the artificial skin produced over 1.7 million data points. These were used to train a machine learning system, teaching it how to interpret different types of contact. Over time, this learning process may allow robots to respond with even greater precision and care.

Dr. Thomas George Thuruthel, a robotics expert at University College London, said the current version of the skin isn’t yet as sensitive as human skin—but it is more advanced than existing robotic touch systems.

He added that the design is both easier to build and more adaptable, and could eventually be refined by studying how humans respond to real touch.