Robust Design of a 3D-and Inkjet-Printed Capacitive Force/Pressure Sensor

We present a method to robust design of a capacitive force/pressure sensor, manufactured in rapid prototyping manner, by adaptation of the electrode structure. Rapid prototyping technologies, such as the considered 3D- and inkjet-printing processes, suffer from major uncertainties in geometry and material properties. The presented methodology consequently aims at minimizing the influence of topology and geometry variations as well as measurement noise on the sensor read-out. It is outlined as a consequence of the beneficial combination of a Latin Hypercube design of experiments and the subsequent Linear Bayesian Minimum Mean Square Error (BMSE) estimator. Even though the additional effort in hardware and signal processing is low, we demonstrate a significant improvement of the measurement uncertainty when we move from a single capacitor to an optimized capacitor array.