“HUMIDITY AND TEMPERATURE SENSING USING ARDUINO”

A project Report
submitted in partial fulfillment
for the degree of
BACHELOR OF TECHNOLOGY
IN
INSTRUMENTATION ENGINEERING

SUBMITTED BY:-

Abhishek Prakash

Department of Instrumentation Engineering

School of Engineering and Technology
H. N. B. Garhwal University, Srinagar Garhwal
Uttrakhand-246174
2018-19
 TABLE OF CONTENT
Contents Page No.

I. Acknowledgement……………………………………………………………1

II.Abstract……………………………………………………………………….2

1.Introduction…………………………………………………………………...3

1.1. Evolution of E-skin………………………………………………...4

2.Architecture…………………………………………………………………...5

3.Tactile Sensing Arrays………………………………………………………...6

3.1. Sensing material and large area sensing array technology………….6

3.2. Tactile sensor on-chip integration……………………………………7

4. Tactile Data Processing Algorithms……………………………………………9

4.1. Continuum-mechanics based approach……………………………….9

4.2. Machine learning based approach……………………………………10

5. Dedicated Embedded System…………………………………………………..11

6.Circuit and Working of E-skin………………………………………………….12

6.1. Circuit………………………………………………………………...12
6.2. Working………………………………………………………………12

7.References………………………………………………………………………13
 LIST OF FIGURES

Name of figure Page No.

1. Detail chronology of evolution of e-skin…………………………………………...4

2. Island carrying electronic surface………………………………………………….5

3.1. Basic skin prototypes a single PVDF transducer…………………………………6

3.2. 16-taxel array …………………………………………………………………….7

3.3. flexible 12-taxel array…………………………………………………………….7

3.4. Reproducibility of the e-skin: charge response of different taxel…………………8

3.5. Linearity of single taxel for different frequencies………………………………....8

4.1. A distribution of forces acts on the cover layer…………………………………….9

4.2. The proposed algorithm reconstructs the force distribution from sensor outputs….10

6.1. Schematics of charge amplifier at sensing at sensing level…………………………12

6.2. From applied force to skin communication interface……………………………….12
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
We would like to thank respected all faculty members for giving us such an opportunity to
expand our knowledge for our branch and giving us guidelines for writing a report. It helped
me a lot to realize of what we study for.

We would like to thank our parents who patiently helped us and for the financial support. We
would like to thank our friends who helped us to make our work more organized and well-
stacked till the end. I would thank Microsoft for developing such a wonderful tool like MS
word. It helped us to work in error free manner.

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 ABSTRACT
The skin is one of the main organs of the human body which implements many different and
relevant functions, e.g. protection of the inner body organs, detection of cutaneous stimuli, etc.
It consists of an integrated, stretchable network of sensors that relay information about tactile
and thermal stimuli to the brain, allowing us to move the organs within our environment safely
and effectively [2,3]. Inspired by human skin, ELECTRONIC SKIN came into existence,
created by artificial means including different technologies of sensing, amplifying and
responding. E-skin has been categorized into two different areas- biochemical area and
electronics area. E-skin has broad application area like biomedical instrumentation, humanoid
and industrial robots, cyber physical system etc [10]. Due to its very complex features, the
development of electronic skin can be effectively tackled using a holistic approach. Electronic
areas deal with
 tactile sensing material and arrays
 tactile data processing algorithms
 communication channel interface.
E-skin is one of the core research area of instrumentation engineering as it includes sensing
technologies, data processing technologies etc. The current achievements in e-skin has been on
following aspects:
 The manufacturing technology of sensor arrays based on piezoelectric polymer
(PVDF) transduction;
 The mixed-mode interface electronics;
 The tactile data processing algorithms;
 The electronic embedded system.
Continued rapid progress in this area is promising for the development of a fully integrated e-
skin soon.

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 1. INTRODCTION
Electronic skin refers to flexible, stretchable and self-healing electronics that are able to
perform functionalities of human skin [1]. Most basic function of human skin is to sense the
physical parameters and process it to brain to perform task. E-skin is designed perform to task
as human skin by sensing physical parameter by tactile sensor and processing signal by
amplifier and embedded system.

The other functions of e-skin are: -

 To protect inner electronic system of robots or of e-skin itself from outer damage.
 To transmit mechanical stimulus in a convenient way to sensing arrays.
 To receive and pre-process the sensor signal in a convenient way.
 To transmit signal to higher ICT infrastructure system. [10]

Historically, the concept of e-skin evolved in 1974 with invention of Prosthetic hand with
sensor and initially designed for robotics to sense, mainly pressure, and physical parameters.
However, first e-skin was infrared e-skin made in 1984 which made a new hot research topic
around the globe. Hence, first e-skin review was made in 2001 with many workshops carried
out earlier like sensitive skin workshop in 1999.

With development of e-skin, many sensing materials, many circuit designs, many transistors
were developed. As mentioned above, e-skin working has been divided into three division: -
tactile sensing arrays, tactile data processing, embedded electronic system. Hence, this report
contains some more details of these three divisions.

Evolution of e-skin with timeline has been described in the following pages with some concepts
used in fantasy world.

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 1.1 EVOLUTION OF E-SKIN

Figure 1- Detailed chronology of evolution of E-skin [9]

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 2. ARCHITECTURE
To attain flexibility like skin, e-skin must experience large deformation strains which can be
attained by structure in which sensor and actuators are closely integrated with microelectronic
circuits [9]. However, many semiconductor ICs are not flexible as it uses rigid and fixed
substrate whose maximum flexibility may be up to 1%.

To attain flexibility and stretchable around 15% or more, sub circuit cells, made of a transducer
and an electronic circuit, will be placed on mechanically separated islands, which are fabricated
on a deformable substrate that takes up most of the total strain. The islands are made sufficiently
rigid to protect them from breaking when the circuit is deformed one time or by repeated
stretching. The sub circuits are electrically connected with stretchable metal conductors.

Figure 2 - Island carrying electronic surface [2]

Island are either polymer-based material or hybrid material having abilities of self-
healing providing protection to inner electronic circuits [1]. Since interconnects of
circuits is important part of e-skin and it must be deformable as well as flexible.
Hence there are three possible interconnects of sub cells [2,3]: -
 making thin metal films that can withstand large plastic deformation,
 deforming a sacrificial mask which serves in liftoff metallization,
 making stretchable metallization.

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 3. TACTILE SENSING ARRAYS

3.1 Sensing material and large area sensing array technology

The most basic step of e-skin development is to identify or develop an appropriate material
which can detect the stimuli and should be flexible, sensitive and application dependent like as
functional skin. Human skin senses the stimuli at very low frequency, so the material should
also attain this property as well. There are many tactile sensors and sensing materials around
the globe used in robotics and various application.

Tactile sensor plays very important role in providing: -

 action–related information such as slip detection;

 control parameters in manipulation and control tasks such as grasping;
 an estimation of contact parameters such as contact force (normal and shear), soft
contact, hardness, texture, temperature, and slip [8].
Piezoelectric polymer films of Polyvinylidene Fluoride (PVDF) have been chosen as meeting
the target requirements of mechanical flexibility, high sensitivity, detectability of dynamic
touch (1Hz-1kHz frequency range) and robustness [5,6]. To provide mechanical flexibility,
PVDF is stretched at temperature below polymer melting point and poling by the application
of very high electric fields (~100V/μm) to give polymer sheet the symmetry of an orthotropic
material. In the e-skin, the PVDF circular taxel is provided of electrodes for charge collection
and it is glued to a rigid substrate and covered by a protective layer.

Figure 3.1- Basic skin prototype a single PVDF transducer [9]

Since, above prototype is on rigid substrate i.e. 16-taxel prototype but same approach can be
used for flexible substrate i.e. 12-taxel prototype.

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 Figure 3.2- 16-taxel array Figure 3.3- flexible 12-taxel array

3.2 Tactile sensor on-chip integration

A good tactile sensing device that can provide an effective and advantageous solution to the
large sensing area is the Piezoelectric Oxide Field Effect Transistor (POSFET). The device is
composed by a high trans-conductance MOS device with a large channel width-to-length ratio,
and a thin film of piezoelectric polymer, like P(VDF-TrFE), deposited by spin coating on the
gate contact [7].

The direct contact between the polymer and the terminal contact of transistor allows for an
efficient capacitive coupling between the transducer material and the electronic device
designed for impedance adaptation and signal amplification. If the piezoelectric material is
poled in the through-thickness direction, when a normal force is applied a voltage arises
between the film surfaces, and a charge accumulation in the transistor channel is induced. In
this way the transistor amplifies the signal generated by the thin film and decouples itself from
the other circuitry with virtually infinite input impedance. The entire device is extremely
compact and suitable to be integrated into an array of sensing elements with high spatial tactile
resolution.

The following graphs represents the reproducibility of e-skin i.e. charge response of different
taxels and linearity of single taxel over ranges of frequencies.

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Figure 3.4- Reproducibility of the e-skin: charge response of different taxel

Figure 3.5- Linearity of single taxel for different frequencies

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 4. TACTILE DATA PROCESSING ALGORITHMS
The e-skin allows a link between perception and action. Processing and interpretation of tactile
data is the next step after sensing the mechanical stimuli to enable response to mechanical
stimuli.
Two different complementary approaches have been pursued:
 One is based on continuum-mechanics, which is application and transducer
independent and aims at reconstructing the applied force distribution.
 Other is based on machine learning technology, which is used to recognize different
touch modalities, avoiding an explicit formalization of the stimulus- ‘sensor response’
relationship and applying empirical induction by learning from- examples approach.
The most basic approach of data processing is to detect the stimuli acting on the skin surface
from finite set of measurement from the sensor beneath the cover layer. But, the limitation of
this is that data is processed only for flat stimuli i.e. normal force acting on sensor grid but
practically, multiple force is applied at multiple region.

4.1 Continuum-mechanics based approach

In this kind of approach, the algorithms are developed for estimating the spatial distribution of
contact forces as well as their intensities and directions starting from sensor data. The proposed
method discretizes external forces at the nodes of a grid and to reconstruct 3-component point
forces applied to the N grid nodes (equal in number to the number of sensors) starting from N
sensor data.
The solution of proposed method has been achieved by use of the Moore-Penrose pseudo-
inverse matrix and of a vector depending on two continuous and adjustable scalar parameters.

Figure 4.1-A distribution of forces acts on the cover layer, which conveys mechanical
‘stress’ information to the sensor array located beneath. Only the pure normal stress
component is recorded. [9]
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Figure 4.2 -The proposed algorithm reconstructs the force distribution from sensor
outputs. [9]

4.2 Machine learning based approach

In this kind of approach, the task is to interpret sensor data to discriminate between a set of
stimuli that the system is expected to recognize. Machine-learning techniques proved to be
useful when the tactile-sensing framework faces challenges like the interpretation of touch
modalities.
A reduction in the overall complexity of the pattern-recognition problem stems from splitting
the modelling process into two tasks:
 The definition of a suitable descriptive basis for the input signal provided by the sensor
(or lattice of sensors),
 The empirical learning of a model for the non-linear function, γ, that maps the feature
space,F, into the set of tactile stimuli of interest:
γ: FT
In general, T includes a finite number of stimuli, hence γ implies a multi-class classification
task.

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 5. DEDICATED EMBEDDED SYSTEM
The processing of data coming from the tactile sensing array concerns a huge amount of data
organized as tensors. In the current implementation, the required data rate is around 640 kbps,
considering 8x8 tactile sensor array, with 10-bit data resolution and 2 kHz of sampling rate
(oversampled at 3 kHz). Considering tactile data at each instant of time as organized inside a
matrix, the dedicated embedded electronic system can reduce the amount of data to transmit
by applying transformation algorithms like the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). SVD is
a stable and effective method to split the system into a set of linearly independent components,
each of them bearing its own energy contribution; it is a numerical technique used to
diagonalize a matrix in numerical analysis.

Table 1 – Embedded electronic system requirement for e-skin [9]

Technology Latency[ms] Transduction Sensor Special Size of the
method Bandwidth resolution[mm] array
[Hz]
Flexible 480 Polymer Based 78 18.5 16x9
PCB FSR
PCB Piezoelectric 80 15 10x23
Flexible 20 Silicon based 100 18 8x8
PCB FSR
Foam layer Capacitive 80 15 4x4
PCB
Organic 480 FSR 3 2.54 16x16
FET

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 6. CIRCUIT AND WORKING OF E-SKIN

6.1 Circuit Diagram

Figure 6.1 – Schematics of charge amplifier at sensing at sensing level [9]

Figure 6.2- From applied force to skin communication interface [9]

6.2 Working
When mechanical stimuli (most likely pressure) applied on piezoelectric polymer of PVDF,
charge generated by the PVDF transducer can be directly converted to voltage by means of
charge amplifier-based electronics because output of piezoelectric is charge. Then, the output
voltage of charge amplifier is passed through low pass filter as the frequency of stimuli is low,
hence giving output only of applied frequencies. These frequencies are further sent to the data
processing system and to higher level of ICT infrastructure.

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 7. REFERENCES

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_skin
2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24151185
3. https://student.societyforscience.org/article/electronic-skin
4. Dahiya RS, Metta G, Cannata G, Valle M. Special Issue on Robotic Sense of Touch. IEEE
Transactions on Robotics2011;27(3):1-ff.
5. Dahiya R, Mittendorfer P, Valle M, Cheng G, Lumelsky VJ. Directions Toward Effective
Utilization of Tactile Skin: A Review IEEE Sensors Journal 2014:13(11):4121-4138.
6. Pinna L, Valle M. Charge Amplifier Design Methodology for PVDF-Based Tactile Sensors.
Journal of Circuits, Systems and Computers 2013;22(8):DOI:10.1142/S0218126613500667.
7. Dahiya RS et al. CMOS implementation of POSFET tactile sensing arrays with on chip
readout. Fourth International Conference on Sensor Technologies and Applications
(SENSORCOMM) 2010.
8. Directions Towards Effective Utilization of Tactile Skin – A Review IEEE Sensors Journal
November 2013 DOI: 10.1109/JSEN.2013.2279056.
9. Electronic Skin: achievements, issues and trends

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