The stretchable carbon black-based strain fiber with a remarkable linearity in a wide sensing range

Ascribed to its wide sensing range,high sensitivity,and low stiff-ness to match target objects with complex 3D shapes,the stretch-able strain sensor has shown its promising applications in various fields,ranging from healthcare,bodynet,and intelligent traffic system,to the robotic system.This paper presents a low-cost and straightforward fabrication technology for the stretchable strain fiber with the combined attributes of a wide sensing range,excep-tional linearity,and high durability.The hybrid composite consist-ing of carbon black and silicone is utilized as the functional material to respond to the external mechanical deformation due to the piezoresistive effect.To address the remarkable hysteresis of the CB-silicone composites,the latex tubes with excellent mechanical robustness and a considerable accessible tensile strain are intro-duced as the outer supporting components.After injecting the conductive CB-silicone composite into these tubes,the stretchable strain fibers are successfully prepared.Notably,the stretchable strain sensor exhibits linearity(R^(2)=0.9854)in a wide sensing range(0-400%)and remarkable durability even after the 2500 cycles under 100%tension.Additionally,the potential of this stretchable strain fiber as the wearable strain sensor and the realtime feedback is demonstrated by detecting the body motion and the expansion devices.

Metal-free Optical Pressure Sensor with High Sensitivity and Extensive Range

Pressure monitoring of a transformer oil tank can grasp the pressure change process caused by gas production when severe internal defects occur and take timely measures to ensure the safe operation of the transformer.Existing pressure sensors generally use metal encapsulation or have an air cavity structure,threatening the transformer’s insulation if it is directly used inside the transformer.To this end,this paper proposes a method for developing a high-sensitivity,large-range,and metallizationfree optical pressure sensing device with temperature compensation.Fiber grating is encapsulated by fluorosilicone rubber and supplemented by an epoxy resin shielding shell on the outside.At the same time,a double-grating vertical arrangement is adopted to improve pressure measurement sensitivity,further avoiding the influence of temperature rise caused by a defect of the transformer on the measurement result of the sensor.In addition,by optimizing the geometric structure of the internal sensitizing element,pre-stretching length of the fiber grating,gap distance,and other parameters,probe size can be reduced while ensuring the sensor’s performance.Results show the proposed method can meet the requirements of sensor fabrication with different sensitivities and ranges,and to a certain extent,both high sensitivity and extensive ranges can be taken into account.The sensitivity of the fabricated prototype is 15 pm/kPa,and the range is about 0.2 MPa.At the same time,the metal-free feature of the sensor makes it suitable for use in various oil-immersed power equipment.It records oil pressure changes caused by oil discharge breakdown,making it sensitive to small pressure changes in early failures.

Seamless integration of above-and undercanopy unmanned aerial vehicle laser scanning for forest investigation

Background:Current automated forest investigation is facing a dilemma over how to achieve high tree-and plotlevel completeness while maintaining a high cost and labor efficiency.This study tackles the challenge by exploring a new concept that enables an efficient fusion of aerial and terrestrial perspectives for digitizing and characterizing individual trees in forests through an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle(UAV)that flies above and under canopies in a single operation.The advantage of such concept is that the aerial perspective from the above-canopy UAV and the terrestrial perspective from the under-canopy UAV can be seamlessly integrated in one flight,thus grants the access to simultaneous high completeness,high efficiency,and low cost.Results:In the experiment,an approximately 0.5 ha forest was covered in ca.10 min from takeoff to landing.The GNSS-IMU based positioning supports a geometric accuracy of the produced point cloud that is equivalent to that of the mobile mapping systems,which leads to a 2–4 cm RMSE of the diameter at the breast height estimates,and a 4–7 cm RMSE of the stem curve estimates.Conclusions:Results of the experiment suggested that the integrated flight is capable of combining the high completeness of upper canopies from the above-canopy perspective and the high completeness of stems from the terrestrial perspective.Thus,it is a solution to combine the advantages of the terrestrial static,the mobile,and the above-canopy UAV observations,which is a promising step forward to achieve a fully autonomous in situ forest inventory.Future studies should be aimed to further improve the platform positioning,and to automatize the UAV operation.

Swelling-Based Chemical Sensing With Unmodified Optical Fibers

We use distributed fiber optic strain sensing to examine swelling of the fiber’s polymer coating.The distributed sensing technique that uses unmodified low-cost telecom fibers opens a new dimension of applications that include leak detection,monitoring of water quality,and waste systems.On a short-range length scale,the technology enables“lab-on-a-fiber”applications for food processing,medicine,and biosensing for instance.The chemical sensing is realized with unmodified low-cost telecom optical fibers,namely,by using swelling in the coating material of the fiber to detect specific chemicals.Although generic and able to work in various areas such as environmental monitoring,food analysis,agriculture or security,the proposed chemical sensors can be targeted for water quality monitoring,or medical diagnostics where they present the most groundbreaking nature.Moreover,the technique is without restrictions applicable to longer range installations.

Steady formation analysis onmulti-robot systems

In this paper,a controller is designed for a group of cooperative robots to achieve the stable displacements.Communication network among the robots is assumed unavailable and each robot can only measure the displacements relative to their neighbours.The controller will enable the robots to move to a predefined formation or a special formation under a suitable protocol which we will design.We will discuss the effect of different sizes of the multi-vehicle system and conduct simulations to verify the effectiveness of the proposed controller and the formation protocols.