Rollers and wheels are widely used in industry and transportation, but there is seldom direct information about contact forces. A smart roller is introduced which provides real‐time pressure measurements from a soft, elastomer‐coated cylinder. The roller is designed for automated fiber placement (AFP) machines, which are widely used in the aerospace industry to manufacture complex composite parts. For optimum process performance, real‐time feedback is highly desirable for detecting flaws during manufacturing. The sensor replaces the elastomer outer layer of a standard roller with 4 by 13 tactile pixels (taxels) of soft capacitive sensors, which provide more than 1 pF of change in capacitance per taxel over a pressure range of 1 MPa. Sensors are made of silicone and mounted on a flexible printed circuit board on which a microcontroller with Bluetooth‐Low‐Energy collects and transmits capacitance data. The sensor dielectric layer is composed of pillars that increase layer compliance and sensitivity while also providing the stiffness of typical industrial rollers. The ability of the roller to measure real‐time local compaction pressure at typical manufacturing speeds enables the monitoring of spatially‐resolved pressure‐time curves, which can be used to predict and control adhesion.
Existing smartwatches offer convenient health monitoring and interfaces with mobile devices. However, the interactivity between a user and a smartwatch suffers from the limited size of the screen and buttons. To improve the usability of smartwatches, novel human-computer interaction methods are introduced into the watchband. To this end, we present a modular lightweight watchband consisting of various capacitive sensing modules—TouchBand. It is made with a flexible printed circuit board (PCB) supporting the bottom electrodes, silver-coated conductive fabric as the top electrodes, and Eco-Flex as the dielectric to electrically separate the PCB and fabric. The watchband incorporates three control modules—(i) two shear-sensitive pressure sensing buttons, (ii) two capacitive sliders, and (iii) one proximity sensing array for hand gesture recognition. Shear forces are captured by analyzing the asymmetric changes in multiple mutual-capacitance readings produced by a shear motion between the top and bottom layers, where overlapped electrodes reside. Sliders pick up changes in proximity as fingers are moved across the sensor surfaces. Hand gestures could be recognized by monitoring the capacitance-based proximity readings between the watchband electrodes and the user’s skin. Eyes-free input to the watch becomes feasible by providing a shear/sliding touch input to the watchband as well as performing a free-hand gesture on the wearing hand. With a flexible printed circuit (FPC) connection to the compact custom electronics, all modules of the watchband were sampled at 50 Hz while consuming 30 mW of power. Meanwhile, the measurement data was wirelessly transmitted through Bluetooth Low-Energy 5.0 (BLE) to a nearby mobile device for real-time data analysis and visualization.
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