Imitating the Cricket Cercal System: The Beauty of the Beast with a Twist of the Engineer

Abstract:

MEMS offers exciting possibilities for the fabrication of bioinspired mechanosensors. Over the last years we have been working on cricket inspired hair-sensor arrays for spatio-temporal flow-field observations (i.e flow-camera) and source localization. Whereas making flow-sensors as energy efficient as cricket hair-sensors appears to be a real challenge we have managed to fabricate capacitively interrogated sensors with sub millimeter per second flow sensing thresholds, to use them in lateral line experiments, address them individually while in arrays tracking transient flows, and use nonlinear effects to achieve parametric filtering and amplification. During these developments we have been working in close collaboration with insect biologists, generating a bidirectional flow of information and knowledge, beneficial to both parties. E.g. where the engineering has greatly benefitted from the insights derived from biology and biophysical models, the biologists have been able to take advantage of MEMS structures allowing for the sort of analysis that is hard to do on living material (e.g. the study of viscous coupling between closely spaced hair-sensors).