Customizable Linear-Range Pressure Sensor: Empowering Multidimensional Object Topography Recognition

Leveraging exceptional flexibility, wearability, and comfortability, flexible pressure sensors demonstrate significant application potential and broad development prospects across various fields such as healthcare, wearable devices, and robotics. Conventional pressure sensors typically infer object shapes indirectly through localized pressure variations, a method limited by their narrow deformation range and reliance on discrete pressure differentials. In this study, we developed a customizable pressure sensor by employing an inverse design approach to optimize the lattice structure, thereby tailoring the capacitance-pressure characteristic curve. The resulting sensor exhibits a wide sensing range of 1260 kPa and high linearity (R² = 0.997), enabling more conformal contact and a comprehensive assessment of surface features, which significantly improves recognition accuracy. Based on this sensor unit, a 10 × 10 sensor array was fabricated capable of detecting multidimensional object topographies. The system has been successfully integrated into a robotic arm for real-time object recognition and classification. This work offers a new technological pathway for the application of pressure sensors in smart wearables and robotic systems.