Imitating the cricket cercal system: The beauty of the beast with a twist of the engineer

摘要

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 capac-itively 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 insect biologists and engineers have been working in close collaboration, generating a bidirectional flow of information and knowledge, beneficial to both. E.g. where the engineering has greatly benefitted from the insights derived from biology and biophysical models, the biologists have taken advantage of MEMS structures allowing for experiments that are hard to do on living material.