Fabrication and Performance Evolution of AgNP Interdigitated Electrode Touch Sensor for Automotive Infotainment

In the present scenario, a considerable assiduity is provided to develop novel human-machine interface technologies that rapidly outpace the capabilities of display technology in automotive industries. It is necessary to use a new cockpit design in conjunction with a fully automated driving environment in order to enhance the driving experience. It can create a seamless and futuristic dashboard for automotive infotainment application. In the present study, an endeavor was made to equip the In-vehicle bezels with printed capacitive sensors for providing superior sensing capabilities. Silver Nanoparticles based interdigitated pattern electrodes were formed over polycarbonate substrates to make printed capacitive sensors using screen printing process. The developed sensor was investigated to evaluate the qualitative and quantitative measures using direct and in-direct contact of touch. The proposed approach for sensors pattern and fabrication can highly impact on sensor performance in automotive infotainment application due to the excellent spatial interpolation with lower cost, light weight, and mechanical flexibility.

Multilayer Methylcellulose Substrate-Based Wearable Touch Sensor and Display for Communication

In recent years, flexible printed circuit boards (FPCBs) that have polyimide substrates have been widely used in electronic devices for industrial and academic research owing to their light weight, high dielectric constant, and flexibility. However, these FPCBs have a critical limitation of recycling, as polyimide is not degradable or eco-friendly. To overcome this issue, we fabricated cellulose-based FPCBs. Transparent and flexible methyl cellulose-based substrate was produced through a simple solvent evaporation process. The circuit layer was patterned of an Ag/carbon-nanotube composite fabricated using a stencil mask. The methyl cellulose-based FPCBs were evaluated for diverse mechanical stresses such as bending, torsional, and tensile stresses. In addition, their surface morphology was analyzed using optical microscopy and scanning electron microscopy. For the electrical properties, in addition to the current–voltage curves, their dielectric properties were analyzed. Finally, we reported the successful wearable communication device of the cellulose-based FPCBs in a 5 × 5 touch panel and a 5 × 5 light-emitting diode display.

Development of a Verbal Robot Hand Gesture Recognition System

This article analyzes the most famous sign languages, the correlation of sign languages, and also considers the development of a verbal robot hand gesture recognition system in relation to the Kazakh language. The proposed system contains a touch sensor, in which the contact of the electrical property of the user's skin is measured, which provides more accurate information for simulating and indicating the gestures of the robot hand. Within the framework of the system, the speed and accuracy of recognition of each gesture of the verbal robot are calculated. The average recognition accuracy was over 98%. The detection time was 3ms on a 1.9 GHz Jetson Nano processor, which is enough to create a robot showing natural language gestures. A complete fingerprint of the Kazakh sign language for a verbal robot is also proposed. To improve the quality of gesture recognition, a machine learning method was used. The operability of the developed technique for recognizing gestures by a verbal robot was tested, and on the basis of computational experiments, the effectiveness of algorithms and software for responding to a verbal robot to a voice command was evaluated based on automatic recognition of a multilingual human voice. Thus, we can assume that the authors have proposed an intelligent verbal complex implemented in Python with the CMUSphinx communication module and the PyOpenGL graphical command execution simulator. Robot manipulation module based on 3D modeling from ABB.

Residence Automation System Using Internet of Things

Home automation using Internet of Things is full of automation and the human being’s life is getting easier as almost everything is systematic by replacing the conventional/manual systems. Recent days, the internet is the mixed part of every human life to gather the knowledge of technology. Internet of things provides a source the devices to connect, sensed by sensors and controlled by remote across a grid infrastructure. Various kind of sensors are designed to meet the need of Home automation such as flame sensor, gas sensor, touch sensor, soil moisture sensor, Infrared sensor where it is connected with Arduino board and it automatically controls the environment. Infrared Sensor is used to find the movement of objects and is used in home automation for example we can use infrared sensor in car shed to monitor the car activities. Based on the car motion we can use infrared sensor. Infrared sensor is used to sense the car movement based on the movement light is automatically changed into on condition and if there is no movement the light turns into off condition. The Arduino board have microcontroller to control all the process occurred in home and it can be sensed by the various sensor and it can be alert to the owner by mail or any other process. The results are obtained with the help of Arduino Software and Arduino UNO for all the sensors.

Pad-Printing as a Fabrication Process for Flexible and Compact Multilayer Circuits

The purpose of this paper is to present a newly developed process for the fabrication of multilayer circuits based on the pad-printing technique. Even though the maturity level, in terms of accuracy, substrate type and print size of several printing industrial processes is relatively high, the fabrication complexity of multilayer printed electronics remains relatively high. Due to its versatility, the pad-printing technique allows the superposition of printed conductive and insulating layers. Compared to other printing processes, its main advantage is the ability to print on various substrates even on flexible, curved or irregular surfaces. Silver-based inks were used for the formulation of conductive layers while UV inks were employed to fulfil the functionality of the insulating layers. To demonstrate the functionality of the pad-printing results, a multilayer test pattern has been designed and printed on Kapton®. Furthermore, to demonstrate the efficacy of this approach, a multilayer circuit composed of three stacked layers has been designed and printed on various substrates including Kapton®, paper and wood. This electronic circuit controls an array of LEDs through the manipulation of a two-key capacitive touch sensor. This study, allowed us to define recommendations for the different parameters leading to high printing quality. We expect a long-term beneficial impact of this study towards a low-cost, fast, and environmental-friendly production of printed electronics.

Duco

Human environments are filled with large open spaces that are separated by structures like walls, facades, glass windows, etc. Most often, these structures are largely passive offering little to no interactivity. In this paper, we present Duco, a large-scale electronics fabrication robot that enables room-scale & building-scale circuitry to add interactivity to vertical everyday surfaces. Duco negates the need for any human intervention by leveraging a hanging robotic system that automatically sketches multi-layered circuity to enable novel large-scale interfaces. The key idea behind Duco is that it achieves single-layer or multi-layer circuit fabrication on 2D surfaces as well as 2D cutouts that can be assembled into 3D objects by loading various functional inks (e.g., conductive, dielectric, or cleaning) to the wall-hanging drawing robot, as well as employing an optional laser cutting head as a cutting tool. Our technical evaluation shows that Duco's mechanical system works reliably on various surface materials with a wide range of roughness and surface morphologies. The system achieves superior mechanical tolerances (0.1mm XY axis resolution and 1mm smallest feature size). We demonstrate our system with five application examples, including an interactive piano, an IoT coffee maker controller, an FM energy-harvester printed on a large glass window, a human-scale touch sensor and a 3D interactive lamp.

Proximity Sensor for Thin Wire Recognition and Manipulation

In robotic grasping and manipulation, the knowledge of a precise object pose represents a key issue. The point acquires even more importance when the objects and, then, the grasping areas become smaller. This is the case of Deformable Linear Object manipulation application where the robot shall autonomously work with thin wires which pose and shape estimation could become difficult given the limited object size and possible occlusion conditions. In such applications, a vision-based system could not be enough to obtain accurate pose and shape estimation. In this work the authors propose a Time-of-Flight pre-touch sensor, integrated with a previously designed tactile sensor, for an accurate estimation of thin wire pose and shape. The paper presents the design and the characterization of the proposed sensor. Moreover, a specific object scanning and shape detection algorithm is presented. Experimental results support the proposed methodology, showing good performance. Hardware design and software applications are freely accessible to the reader.