Sensing Our World: From Your Badge to the Future of Robotics - EMF 2026

So, welcome to to EMF and my talk about MEMS in general, the micromechanical measurement systems um in very small silicon things. uh one of these wonderful no two in in a new batch. We actually have two of these MEMS things uh an acceleration sensor which was two years ago already which was sponsored by Bosch and a second one which I just learned a magneettometer compass from a Chinese company and I want to talk a little bit about what's possible these days and give some ideas also what you might be able to do with your Tagon. So what's vamps in general these are micromechanical systems where you have one silicon I will show that in more details in one block there's something moving where you can measure the acceleration the rotation magnet field things like that and it's always a little bit of electronics in the second chip where you do the measurement on the analog things um and then have an interface for getting the data out to your microcontroller um the things are very small. I will have samples where you can have then look on later in the Q&A tent or in the workshops how small things are getting in the meantime. Uh but it's most of the time it looks like this or similar. I have also other examples how mechanically these things are handled in the meantime. Those sensors are around for quite a long time already. you used it every time in your gaming toys whatever everything which is moving um your mobile phone uses that the first step was always just having guest just that if your mobile phone is up and down very slow in the meantime this I don't know how you call it vacuum cleaner automatic robotic cleaning things use it for doing motion control and do indoor navigation to know how how they moved and if they have to rotate and things like that. Uh we also have gas sensors where you can do air quality or alcohol measurements and all these things. They are in hearables, you can do head shaking and a lot of things which I never used myself. So a lot of these things are already in the consumer electronic technology wise. Um making micromechanical sensors at least that Bosch started up in the automotive industry with a famous Elk test from Daimlo where a car flipped over and they realized they need something for ESP for controlling the braking. [clears throat] Sorry. And then because they had a ESP sensor, but it was bulky and very expensive for special things in cars, they decided we needed small, cheap, and now. And then the very first silicon sensors got invented. And a bit later, they got so small and so cheap that it's plenty of those sensors are in every mobile phone, in every smart device, in every batch, things like that. These days everybody's talking about AI and everything is done with AI and mobilization and robotics and autonomous blah whatever. The problem is with all this robotic and autonomous driving in the AI they need input they need data and they need sensing. If they have no clue what your delivery autonomous robot is doing it's not working. If your robot is trying to touch something and you have no information what the robot is doing, it's not working well. And this is the reason why in the last decades sensors got changed a lot for how they've been using. It started with you have a robot and you just have an acceleration sensor to make sure the robot arm is not shaking too much and it's a smooth operation and you know where it's heading to. That's not all possible with only angle sensors and things like that. Then that famous indoor cleaning device uh which can use for indoor navigation. Then it's 20 years later the measurement of the sensors is a bit more accurate and it knows when it accelerates and you can measure how much it's rotating. if the wheels are slipping on your pocket, carpet, whatever. Um, to make uh reasonably precise movements or for your uh lawn, what's it called? Lawn grass cutting things. They're also using that. The next uh step was those coats really doing tactile things and trying precise positioning and uh getting hands on things in laboratory. making sure that they don't have too much faults and things like that and can't harm anyone. And now everybody's talking about humanoid robots. They can do everything and help you with everything. The problem is when they really have to touch you something someone else. Um it's not helpful if the robot doesn't know what's the pressure the force uh it's touching to. This is the reason there's also measurement data the AI needs that the robot behaves softly to you. And here you can see someone teaching a robot or whatever in a laboratory and now the robot tries to take a glass or whatever and not crush it because yeah force would be possible. And this is why pressure sensors which before have been using used in mobile phones just for yeah pressure measurements for weather forecast and things like that. Um nowadays and where also for indoor navigation that um the mobile phone can um measure which floor your for that body reckoning if something happens and maybe you can't see or you're just uh unconscious. uh the pressure sensor can tell how high you're from the base of the basement of the uh building. This is because they really measure we'll show that in the next slide I think uh in the accuracy of centimeters in the meantime but [clears throat] uh pressure sensors also can be used now within the fingers uh with some fluid or whatever that if uh the fluid in the fingers with a soft tissue um start pressing on the glass or we have an example where the robot tries to touch a strawberry and shouldn't squeeze that and make juice out of it, but just pick it up and put it somewhere else. Um, then the pressure goes up a little bit and the sensors are so precise that you feel that pressure increase in the tissues of the fingers uh with some fluid that you really can softly handle people, strawberries, whatever you like. And also magnet meters which have been used just for having a compass and things like that uh also can be you not not at misused can be used because they're horribly precise. Am I shaking that thing? No it's it's the wind. Um if you have a small not only measuring the earth magnet field but if you have a very small magnet somewhere nearby you can detect very well how your sensor the mechanics are moving. So you if you have anything where you want to make sure it's not slipping or moving or you want to measure the distance um then the magnets are so simple. In the workshop I will have a model a 3D model of a sensor. If you maybe can show that very is a 3D printed model of a whole sensor an acceleration sensor and it's really working. You can move all the plastic parts and instead of doing the electronic measurement because it's all plastic there are small magnets and exactly with that sensor we can measure how those parts are moving and how an acceleration sensor is really working can be displayed on a tablet play with that later in a Q&A tent or in the workshops which I will give. So these are possibilities using magnets for other things. Actually old hall sensor things have been what I told in washing machines for decades where it's on the axis and of your washing machine. And that way if it bent down a little bit they realize how high is the load of your washing machine and how much cloth you put in and how much water you leave things like that. But that's now on a much finer scale also for having tactile robot things. So that's what's possible these days with modern sensors. And here you just in the middle see the measurement things of the most decent uh generation of pressure sensors which in the old times they had resistors and for the membran bending a little bit with the resistor. You mentioned uh the change of the length of the resistor got that way a pressure difference in pressure. And this is the upper signal. If if you walk upstairs in a building, it's with a lot of noise and zixs and now it's so less noise. So uh that you really can see every single staircase and uh play around with measuring hats in centimeter quality. And if you look at that thing that's a very small sensor, I have a real one also in my sample kit. And looking at the dimensions, it's just you can't really find that the capacity change is some auto farat. Typically, if you're doing electronics, it's you have many magnitudes of morphs for everything. The membrane itself is only about six pometer deviation which get gets detected for a step and for the small resolution and pressure difference. So we have 10 100,000 hector pascal is the base pressure and it's two pascal. So 150 one over 50,000 uh to the vector thing. And just to get a little bit an idea everything is soccer these days or foot is it football here? I think soccer is only American. Um and that that membrane if you look at that it's really 120 micrometer or two hair diameters on top of the base plate. If the membrane would have been the whole soccer field and similar pictures we have for magnetometer. Um the most recent versions uh use some quantum effects for doing measurements. The older ones had also have been magneto restrictive things which is what's been used here on the sensor and newer technologies and measurement things just made it a bit more precise and for doing that very short distance measurements and also here the size is just um if you that very small medium gray insulator this is the main part where uh the physics happen for tunneling electrons which where the tunneling current changes if the magnet field changes and the size on scaled up to a uh soccer field again is two micrometer lawn height you needed that precise to make sure that all the magnetic stuff is working as you expect and not just I think last example what also can happen now I talked a little bit about pressure sensor magnet sensor for tactile things that it's not slipping. Uh a very classical uh usage now of the acceleration sensor which we are using also in the tagon is uh image stabilization. It's been used in expensive cameras for decades already for SLR cameras. Now it's standard in all the mobile phone sensor chips that you measure that your camera chip is shaking and you do a lot of measurements or pictures and you then uh dig it all that uh that's very important for all the autonomous things which use cameras for looking in their region that it's not an unsharp thing where you can't detect the cat anymore that you get a sharp picture and have a nice picture of the cat makes AI much easier detecting cats even they're reasonably good in detecting heads but maybe not in green plants and other things. Yeah. And a lot of other things uh somewhere was uh for the motion control if your robot tries to walk around and that you easily can detect when it slips over the border of a caret or whatever and hopefully is agile enough then uh to not fall down and break things. So a lot of new opportunities where you can play with sensors. Um, now a little bit uh what's ah this is the old tagon but I just managed it's over there the new til again. I just uh build it up this morning. Sorry for the old picture. Didn't think about that slide but it's more or less the same. This is really the sensor which is on the baseboard for both both generations for the baseboard uh thing. This is now an IMU in the inertial measurement unit. So it can do acceleration in all three dimensions. So both gravity or if you accelerate something if you move it in any direction that's getting measured by the thingy and also the rotation. So you really can integrate that because now uh they're getting more and more precise in every generation that you just can add how much you accelerated or how much you turned and do indoor navigation with only that and you really can count if you did a full circle rotation with 360° because they have resolutions of some millere whatever things that I've seen samples pe colleagues walking with sensors years ago around our main mil building in the Cambara uh in our company and walking 10 times around the building and doing image track not image tracking uh walk way tracking uh both with a sensor and a GPS and since the high building the GPS reception was quite bad and running 10 times around our main building uh the track looked much better and more precise and came to the front door more precise than with the GPS signal because GPS wasn't that great. Indoor GPS is not working at all. So that's all possible with those very small mechanical sensors where we have a real 3D printed thing. And uh these are the times for the workshops which I give. So the first one this afternoon at 3:00, Saturday 1:00 and Sunday 3:00. So where we can talk about MEMS's technologies, about what's in the sensor, how you can program the sensor. I'm prepared for just playing a little bit with micro python uh that you can connect with a cable write your own very small program getting measurement data switching on LED see how easy it is with all the microcontrollers these days uh playing with that and also if someone is interested I'm prepared didn't try that so far uh talking a bit about how we can connect other sensors and playing around with other sensors as a tagon extension having a extension board. I used a breadboard and try to connect some of the others. For example, a pressure sensor thing. Oh, all right. If you're interested in that, get in contact with me in the Q&A session. Have a look at the samples um or in the workshops where there way more time than doing really hands-on programming. If you're interested in that, bring your notebook, your tilder gun that we can do some programming examples if you like. Uh, other than that, yeah, Bosch sensor tech is doing all these sensor things only for the consumer electronic. The real Bosch Gmbbh, robot Bosch GBH is doing that for the automotive. All the sensors are I'm not sure if there's a uh all the sensors are built up in a FEP in Royan in German. It's near near Stokot in the southwest. And here you can see a little bit size of those things. I I also have a real wave with me that you can see a little bit of silicon and gold. And that's what's over there. Can have a look on that later. This is now really a scan of real acceleration sensor with the same size thing. If if you have a soccer stadium then because now the whole mechanical things things which are free to swing around in all the three directions for X Y and Z axis to do that measurements and if you scale it up on uh the socket plate again that upper steel plate or the silicon plate where you see those small spring things um that's uh about 10 cm above the grass and the structure thickness of that steel plate measurement plate is 1 m. So we have a a plate of 1 m thickness which is uh 9 mm plus minus uh so very precise thickness and it's only 10 cm with less than a millm um variation on top of your soccer press that those measurement things in today quality are working. Yeah. And we really still Bosch has a lot of problems um with automotive things but yeah or the consumer electronic is using more and more sensors in the robotics and AI and whatever needing more input to think about. So our tech technology thing is booming and we we are hiring a lot of people look for people for electronics, semiconductors, programming AI for uh understanding data. the the old sensors they had a little bit of handprogrammed assembler code where you could detect if it's upside down or step counting is done in the sensors with a small CPU and more and more this is not programmed any anymore manually but you have small models in the old time I did AI in university in the 80s end of the 80s for biomechanics and it was just a matrix and neural networks it's exactly the same and it's also what happens in sensors more and more that you have very all neural networks where can interpret the measurement data and things like that and making the sensors the itself a bit bit more intelligent. I don't like that work, but they have more features and it's you don't have to program them manually and try to figure out what's the best algorithm in C assembler or whatever to detect if there was a step if you stand up or sit down if you're walking or cycling with a bicycle or sit in a car thing. sensors can detect all those things in the meantime both by programming and more and more just having a lot of sample data and then analyzing the sample data with some AI if you like that. So I'm way too fast. What else can I Yeah, maybe you can uh switch on the camera for last thing. So what's yeah I've contrast is horrible but I have some more presentation. This is a big sample of that pressure sensor and here we can even show how how the sensors are built up internally. It can be opened and you can look into the silicon things where the mechanics are and the ASIC chips or the electronics are in and can have a little bit diving in. those things for different types of sensors and and this is a very small sample. The camera won't get it about the real sizes of real sensors how they look. So these are the small acceleration sensors. That's a pressure sensor which you can have a look at. It's a few pixels here but with good eyes you can get an idea what's in your mobile phone and your robots and what you can use for the next generation of your own gadgets. Okay. Thank you very much for your attention. [cheering] [applause] >> Thank you very much, Harold. Uh I believe you're going to be doing Q&A in the Q&A tent afterwards. >> So that's on the other side of the robot arms. >> If there are now one or two questions, if it's possible to have time. >> I think we do actually. >> So anything the stage >> was horribly unclear or extra information. >> Anyone like to raise their hands with a question? No, >> maybe not. >> Anyone interested in coming to the workshop and playing with mess with sensors with programming? Ah, I see some heads. Wonderful. So, oh, oh, that's just another picture which I don't have anywhere. The old pressure sensors and gas sensors look like that. That's a gas sensor. It's always a metal housing and there's a hole that gas or pressure can get in and out. um the last pressure sensor of that generation. The problem is always uh with that hole also fluid uh dust particles uh uh humidity can get in which is not good for all the sensors no matter if it's the gas sensor or pressure sensor. Uh the last generation of that hardware had two very small holes uh a tenth of that diameter. You can't barely see them by eye. And now the new one is uh there is no metal shielding, no housing whatever it's only a gel inside and so you can use then it's completely covered and you can use it even in fluids and whatever. This is why it works for the tactile things in robot arms and this is where I wanted to step on. The workshops are in the workshop tent number six and always in the afternoon playing around and asking around whatever. I have some ideas which I would like to learn the next days. Let's see what's interesting for you and me. Other comments also always welcome. >> Is there a limit to like how small these sensors can be? Is there a limit like >> is there like a limit to how small you can make the sensor door? There's always a limit what the customers say. It should be smaller because yeah when I'm only working for the company now 12 years and I never did sensors myself but uh the old sensors I was working on an optical system which was 5.5 mm in high and it was planned to go in smartphones 12 years 15 years ago but when we have been ready with technology there was no smartphone around anymore which allowed any device having 5 and a half millimeters in height so it didn't went into smartphones uh then sensors had in a typical head of 2 mm. Then again, a this is way too high. Our G is more slim and we have more electronics. So modern sensors are 6 mm something like that. A third of that heat and yeah look at the small sensors. They always complain it's too big and it uses too much current. Depends what you do. Uh the tendency is going that you have multiple sensors. uh what now happens also for the size for the footprint of uh the sensors that we don't put uh the the mechanical sensors what I've shown before this is old technology the mechanical sensor and the electronics side by side now it's getting stacked uh that we really have a mechanical thing and put the electronics and everything in silicon on top and no plastic cover and anything that's then called basic cap so you have the cap on top and it's only silicon things with the mechanical things and the electronics and the CPU and everything in two slices which are glued together no plastic no nothing that it's getting as small and also then you shrink down the footprint you can see that in 3D printed model how this looks like a little bit one example is for example then yeah also it depends a little bit how how many pins you need for what your sensors is all doing I just noted that magnet sensor which is on it has exactly four pins power data. That's it. So, this one, what is it? It's an acceleration sensor. Has six pins. Look at the data sheet what it's good for. And this is exactly something like that. This is the electronics, the ASIC, the analog and electronic part. Here is the mechanical thing with all the springs and measurement analog parts. And you glue that together. And on the silicon side of the electronics output, you get the uh soldering balls. It's BGA bolt array. This is also what you use for your CPU, big CPUs and your big computers. And this is a small example in a real way for where you can see that tin balls which can be used as the contacts for your small things. So this is also and dimensions of these things depend it's a little bit can be in a distance of 6 mm the old one like this 4 mm and it's always difficult to get contacts if you need that and things like well that's mechanics don't collect have to solve it and the smaller you make the things some effects are getting better but you get more noise and depending is always how much electricity you need how good the signal quality is but tendencies It's getting smaller and smaller and smaller and some sensors are really horribly small and you can't see the pins anymore and have a look at that in the Q&A tent. Okay. And maybe I wrap up and we can meet wherever the Q&A tent is if you want to have a look at that or come to the workshops and we can play around and fantastic. >> Thank you very much.