Crickets as Bio-Inspiration for MEMSBasedFlow-Sensing
Résumé
MEMS offers exciting possibilities for the fabrication of bio-inspiredmechanosensors. Over the last few years, we have been working on cricketinspiredhair-sensor arrays for spatio-temporal flow-field observations (i.e. flowcamera) and source localisation. Whereas making flow-sensors as energy efficientas cricket hair-sensors appears to be a real challenge we have managed to fabricatecapacitively interrogated sensors with sub-millimeter per second flow sensingthresholds, to use them in lateral line experiments, address them individually whilein arrays, track transient flows, and use non-linear effects to achieve parametricfiltering and amplification. In this research, insect biologists and engineers havebeen working in close collaboration, generating a bidirectional flow of informationand knowledge, beneficial to both, for example, where the engineering has greatlybenefitted from the insights derived from biology and biophysical models, thebiologists have taken advantage of MEMS structures allowing for experiments thatare hard to do on living material.