Recent advances and challenges of tactile sensing for robotics: from fundamentals to applications

Tactile sensing technology has become indispensable for next-generation robotic systems, offering unprecedented capabilities in mechanical stimulus detection through physical interaction. While this field has evolved significantly over three decades, recent innovations in material architectures, bioinspired microstructures, and hybrid sensing mechanisms have enabled transformative advances in electronic skin, dexterous manipulation, and human-robot collaboration. In this review, we systematically reviewed the development of tactile sensors by critically analyzing designs to applications, and focused on recent progress in advanced materials, complex structure design and promising applications. Based on the difference of sensing mechanism, we introduced some novel material-level strategies (resistive, capacitive, piezoelectric, triboelectric, and vision-based sensors) that achieve synergistic improvements in sensitivity and robustness. Furthermore, breakthroughs in 3D microstructures of sensors are summarized with comparisons of sensing performance. These architectural innovations not only augment perceptual capabilities but also significantly improve operational durability without performance degradation. Based on enhanced performance of tactile sensors, emerging applications in perception and recognition, manipulation with extremely high accuracy, medical care and so on were introduced. We further identify underexplored opportunities and challenges in tactile processing, providing a roadmap for future research. Finally, the challenges and prospects of the future development of tactile sensors are pointed out.