Femtosecond-Laser-Engineered Asymmetric Bilayer Microstructures for Ultrawide-Range High-Sensitivity Flexible Pressure Sensors
Flexible pressure sensors are pivotal for wearable electronics and intelligent robotics, yet conventional single-layer uniform microstructures suffer from a critical tradeoff between sensitivity and sensing range. Inspired by the dome-shaped pressure receptors of varying sizes found in crocodile skin, this paper proposes and fabricates an asymmetric, bilayer microstructure array flexible piezoresistive pressure sensor based on one-step femtosecond laser fabrication technology. The sensor uses polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) as a flexible substrate, with micro-dome arrays of different sizes fabricated on both surfaces using a femtosecond laser. This ensures high fidelity and consistency in the microstructure morphology. Benefiting from the asymmetric bilayer structural design, the sensor achieves high sensitivity (64.1 kPa−1) and excellent linearity (R2 = 0.985) across an extremely wide operating range of 0.5–2000 kPa, while also demonstrating fast response and recovery times (104 ms/38 ms), excellent cyclic stability (>10 000 cycles), and resistance to vibration interference. The microstructure remained stable even after 10 000 fatigue load cycles. It enables reliable geological identification for detector vehicles and precise object-size classification for mechanical claws, demonstrating great promise for high-performance robotic perception applications.