A team from National Taiwan University has created a robotic sensing platform capable of identifying bacteria through touch.
The team explained that rapid identification of bacteria is critical in the healthcare, food safety, environmental monitoring and infection control fields, with the most common first steps being gram classification, wherein bacteria is separated into gram-positive and gram-negative groups. While this data can reportedly help guide early treatment decisions and safety responses, gram staining involves many chemical steps, trained personnel and manual interpretation.
Source: Nano Energy (2026). DOI: 10.1016/j.nanoen.2026.111879
As such, the team developed its robotic sensing platform, which features a flexible sensor mounted on a robotic gripper, noting that when the robot gently encounters a bacterial sample, the surface of the bacteria creates a small electrical signal. Thanks to their different cell wall structures, gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria generate different signal patterns.
In the lab, the team tested representative bacteria — Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus, Staphylococcus epidermidis and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. When they combined signals from two sensing materials and analyzed the patterns with a computer model, the system achieved roughly 90.93% accuracy in terms of distinguishing gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria with a response time of 620 milliseconds.
This approach, according to its developers, does not require staining reagents or additional labels. Further, the robotic platform lessens the need for direct human handling of bacterial samples.
The team suggests that this new, nondestructive touch-based sensing strategy could one day contribute to expedited point-of-care diagnostics, automated microbiology workflows and safer bacterial monitoring in healthcare and environmental settings.
Additional development could potentially enhance the platform to include broader pathogen panels, such as antibiotic-resistant bacteria and other clinically important microorganisms.
"By turning a simple touch into an electrical fingerprint, our system offers a faster and safer way to identify bacteria without chemical labels," the team concluded.
An article detailing the system, “Triboelectric nanosensor-based robotic platform for rapid label-free discrimination of Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria,” appears in the journal Nano Energy.
