Development of a Compact Acquisition System for Touch Location on a Conformable Monoport Distributed Sensor

Abstract

A compact acquisition system developed for a flexible large area monoport tactile surface is presented in this paper. This sensor requires a single port connection and avoids complicated matrix acquisition system and multiplexing. The tactile surface is based on a coplanar transmission line printedd on a large area flexible substrate. Touching the waveguide generates a reflected signal. A harmonic analysis of this reflected signal at the line input port allows locating the touch event. A compact and low complexity acquisition system has been developed in order to demonstrate the principle and evaluate the feasibility of its integration on the sensor. Theoretical background, design and measurements on the overall sensor are exposed. The acquisition circuit imperfections have been demonstrated experimentally and correction methods have been proposed and implemented. Results are presented, and to assess the precision of the compact acquisition system, they are compared to reference measurements made with a Vector Network Analyzer