Nanocrack Encoded Electronic Skin for Vectorial Strain Sensing.

Authors

Xinran Yan, Yuhang Yang, Xuan Li, Chuchao Wang, Pan Li, Jixin Chu, Weiyi Liu, Yifei Li, Jiaxuan Zhang, Junwei Wang, Yi Li, Mengxi Wu, Junshan Liu

Published in

Small (Weinheim an der Bergstrasse, Germany). Pages e75345. Aug 25, 2026. Epub Aug 25, 2026.

Abstract

Human skin perceives both the magnitude and direction of mechanical stimuli, an essential capability for dexterous interaction yet fully unrealized in humanoid robotics. Here we introduce a metallic nanocrack-based electronic skin (Crack-eSkin), a strain vector perceptron that encodes the complete strain vector through the algorithmic geometry of nanocracks in the 50 nm thick gold film. When mechanically stretched, orthogonal cracks open differentially depending on orientation, producing distinct signals that simultaneously encode both strain magnitude and direction as a two-dimensional resistive fingerprint. This mechanism transforms mechanical stretch into an ultra-sensitive (gauge factor: 3609) material-level response that preserves both parameters at their source. Feeding encoded signal sequences into the developed geometry-aware multitask temporal network (RMT-Net) enables the joint prediction of strain magnitude and loading angle, achieving R² values of 0.982 for strain and 0.985 for angle. Installed onto an artificial face model, the Crack-eSkin can quantitatively resolve sequential strain vectors of 2.60% at 87.4°, 1.84% at 7.7°, and 3.20% at 45.2° that human subjects could only describe qualitatively, paving the way for next-generation robotic systems with human-like or superior mechanosensation.

PMID:
42638618
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 25 Aug 2026.

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