Proximity distance estimation based on electric field communication between 1 mm3 sensor nodes

Weareworking towardactualizing a real-time3D modeling system. This modeling system uses a sensor network that distributesmany 1mm-class sensor nodes in plastic clay. The distributed sensors sense the distances between them, and the sensor network collects the node-to-node distance information to recognize the clay shape by calculating the relative positions of the nodes. This paper proposes a distance estimation method based on electrical field communication through capacitive coupling between sensor nodes for the 3Dmodeling system.Anelectrical signal is transmitted through a closed loop composed of node-to-node capacitive coupling, and the signal attenuation is used for the distance estimation. We investigate the gain and directivity of the signal transmission with electric field and circuit simulations to explore appropriate electrode designs for the proposed method. We also evaluate the feasibility of the node localization with the proposed distance estimation method.