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About

Benjamin Ward-Cherrier is a robotics researcher whose work sits at the exciting intersection of tactile sensing, biomimetic design, and dexterous robotic manipulation. He is perhaps best known for his foundational contributions to the TacTip family of soft optical tactile sensors, whose 2018 paper documenting these 3D-printed, biomimetically inspired sensors has amassed over 550 citations — establishing it as a landmark reference in the field. His earlier work demonstrated that such sensors could achieve remarkable superresolution localization of just 0.1mm, a 40-fold improvement over raw sensor resolution, opening new possibilities for precision robotic touch. Ward-Cherrier has consistently pushed the boundaries of what tactile feedback can achieve in real-world manipulation tasks, developing tactile grippers, thumb-integrated sensors, and model-free manipulation frameworks that bring robot dexterity closer to human capability. More recently, his research has expanded into neuromorphic computing, combining event-based optical tactile sensors with spiking neural networks for tasks like edge orientation detection and texture recognition — work represented by his NeuroTac platform. He has also applied tactile sensing to industrial applications such as real-time defect detection in composite manufacturing. Across his career, Ward-Cherrier has helped redefine how robots can feel, interpret, and act upon the sense of touch.