High speed vision system for the dynamic characterization of 3D printed sensors

Additive manufacturing technologies allows to create a wide variety of geometries even for single prototypes, allowing to develop 3D printed sensors, optimizing the characteristics of the sensing device to the need of each specific application. The dynamic characterization of these sensors is a key point, in particular for the applications where internal deformation of the sensor is used to transduce the quantity of interest. In this work, a 3D measuring system based on a single high speed camera is developed to characterize the dynamic behaviour of 3D printed accelerometer prototypes. The proposed measuring technique is based on the pose estimation: a vision-based method that allows to recover the position and orientation of a target of known geometry, by means of its image acquired by a single camera. The dynamic response of the 3D printed prototypes is analysed with impulse, random and harmonic excitation. Experimental results proved that the developed measuring technique is suitable for the test of this type of sensors, since allows to measure the motion of the suspended mass and of the external frame, without any loading effect and considering the six degrees of freedom contemporarily.