Recent developments in 3D printing, also known as additive manufacturing, have helped fabricate conductive structures, such as force sensors. This project aims to design and manufacture a flexible force sensor based on a transmission line model using Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM), a 3D printing technology technique. Usually, 3D printed sensors exhibit anisotropic behaviour and have imperfections that affect the sensors' electrical properties. For example, the plates' resistance in a capacitive force sensor limits the maximum possible readout frequency. The force sensor is a flexible parallel plate capacitor, printed using a flexible conductive carbon black-filled Thermoplastic Polyurethane (TPU). The force applied to the sensor changes the sensor's resistance and capacitance, which changes the impedance. The change in the impedance is measured using an in house developed multi-frequency impedance analyzer.
Using this method, we measured both the total force applied and the location where the force is applied, using a low complexity sensor with a minimal number of connections. The resulting 3D printed sensor is highly customizable and hence, shows great potential for implementation in prosthetic and robotics applications.
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