Circuit Schematics of a Capacitive Proximity Sensor

Abstract

The purpose of this paper consists in development of hardware, ensuring artificial tactile sensing of an anthropomorphic robot. Through analysis, performed to that end, it was discovered, that the majority of capacitive sensors, installed as well on the grippers of the anthropomorphic robots, as on robots of other types are implemented in terms of microelectromechamical systems (MEMS) technology. Obstacle detection and surface type recognition using the solutions, discussed in the related work, requires much closer proximity, than with the capacitive sensor, developed by us. We present a circuit schematics implementation of the sensor and charted graphical dependencies of the output voltage from distance for various objects, tracked by the sensor and made of different materials. We present experiment outcomes, obtained on examples of water and aqueous salt solution. We discovered, that the output voltage when using solid materials has similar values, but the respective values were quite different in the case of water or aqueous salt solution.