Additive Manufactured Capacitive Displacement Sensor for Pin Array Grippers: One-Shot and Stacked Fabrication Approaches

This research presents a capacitive displacement sensor, designed for integration into pin array gripper. The sensor employs a plate capacitor structure to measure the displacement of individual pins, with each pin positioned to move between the electrodes. The design is optimized for additive manufacturing, offering advantages in customisation, adaptability to various pin gripping systems and a compact form factor. It also opens up new possibilities for integrating sensing elements directly into the structure of the gripper. This study investigates the differences between sensors that are partially additive manufactured and subsequently assembled versus those that are printed in one-shot. Prototype sensors were fabricated in two different ways and tested in an experimental setup to validate their functionality and to enable a comparison of performance against the results of numerical simulations.