Despite the abundance of localization applications, the tracking devices have never been truly realized in E-textiles. Standard printed circuit board (PCB)-based devices are obtrusive and rigid and hence not suitable for textile based implementations. An attractive option would be direct printing of circuit layout on the textile itself, negating the use of rigid PCB materials. However, high surface roughness and porosity of textiles prevents efficient and reliable printing of electronics on textile. In this work, by printing an interface layer on the textile first, a complete localization circuit integrated with an antenna has been inkjet-printed on the textile for the first
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), also known as autonomous drones, are being utilized for a variety of applications such as disaster management, search and rescue, surveillance, and remote monitoring. The wireless link to transfer the data from the drone to the ground station or another drone is critical for such applications. Antenna, being the most important part of that wireless link, must be designed such that it seamlessly integrates with the drone without affecting its flight. This means the antenna must be thin, lightweight, conformal, and provide wide coverage. On the other hand, antenna's performance must not be deteriorated due to UAV mounting, so antennas with ground planes are preferred. Further, to cater for high data rate applications, a large bandwidth is required, which is difficult to achieve on thin substrates. In this paper, a dual band design is presented that addresses all the key requirements for a drone antenna. Specifically, the bandwidth is enhanced without increasing the substrate thickness. The proposed dual-mode antenna demonstrates one of the largest bandwidths (4% at 2.4 GHz and 7% at 5.2 GHz) on a thin substrate (0.0128 λ0) and presents one of the highest gain (~10dBi) in comparison to the published UAV antennas. It is shown that the antenna's performance does not deteriorate for moderate bending conditions. Finally, a 3-element triangular multiple input multiple output (MIMO) configuration is designed and seamlessly integrated with the UAV body to demonstrate its efficacy.
A WiFi Tracking Device Printed Directly on Textile for Wearable Electronics Applications Bauyrzhan KrykpayevWearable technology is quickly becoming commonplace in our everyday life -fitness and health monitors, smart watches, and Google Glass, just to name a few. It is very clear that in near future the wearable technology will only grow. One of the biggest wearable fields is the E-textiles. E-textiles empower clothes with new functionality by enhancing fabrics with electronics and interconnects. The main obstacle to the development of E-textile field is the relative difficulty and large tolerance in its manufacturing as compared to the standard circuit production. Current methods such as the application of conductive foils, embroidering of conductive wires and treatment with conductive coatings do not possess efficient, fast and reliable mass production traits inherent to the electronic industry. On the other hand, the method of conductive printing on textile has the potential to unlock the efficiency similar to PCB production, due to its roll-to-roll and reel-to-reel printing capabilities. Furthermore, printing on textiles is a common practice to realize graphics, artwork, etc. and thus adaptability to conductive ink printing will be relatively easier. Even though conductive printing is a fully additive process, the end circuit layout is very similar to the one produced via PCB manufacture. However, due to high surface roughness and porosity of textiles, efficient and reliable printing on textile has remained elu-
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