Development of an MEMS based biomimetic whisker sensor for tactile sensing

It has been demonstrated that biological whisker sensing system has excellent capacity to achieve the pattern recognition, and whisker sensor based robot tactile perception has caused widespread concern. However, most of current existed whisker sensors are too large in size, and are difficult to be integrated into a small robot. In this paper, we proposed a MEMS based biomimetic whisker sensor inspired by rats, which integrates four sensing units on a square silicon wafer with a side length of 6.8mm and makes it possible to be installed on a small robot with similar size to a real rat. Our sensor measure the bending moment at the root of the whisker based on the piezoresistive effect. We have explored the range of functions that whisker arrays can serve on and it is shown that our whisker sensor can determine obstacle distance, and is also capable of gathering surface information including shape and texture.

[1]  K. C. Aw,et al.  Low velocity digital air flow sensor from 3D printed PEDOT:PSS micro-hair structures , 2015, 2015 Transducers - 2015 18th International Conference on Solid-State Sensors, Actuators and Microsystems (TRANSDUCERS).

[2]  Mathew H. Evans,et al.  Tactile Discrimination Using Active Whisker Sensors , 2012, IEEE Sensors Journal.

[3]  Lucie A. Huet,et al.  Tactile Sensing with Whiskers of Various Shapes: Determining the Three-Dimensional Location of Object Contact Based on Mechanical Signals at the Whisker Base. , 2017, Soft robotics.

[4]  M. Brecht,et al.  Functional architecture of the mystacial vibrissae , 1997, Behavioural Brain Research.

[5]  William C Eberhardt,et al.  Development of an artificial sensor for hydrodynamic detection inspired by a seal’s whisker array , 2016, Bioinspiration & biomimetics.

[6]  Qiang Huang,et al.  Design and Control of a Biomimetic Robotic Rat for Interaction With Laboratory Rats , 2015, IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics.

[7]  DaeEun Kim,et al.  Biomimetic whiskers for shape recognition , 2007, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[8]  H. Witte,et al.  Structural Characterization of the Whisker System of the Rat , 2012, IEEE Sensors Journal.

[9]  Donald J. Leo,et al.  Flow field sensing with bio-inspired artificial hair cell arrays , 2016 .

[10]  A. HuetLucie,et al.  Tactile Sensing with Whiskers of Various Shapes: Determining the Three-Dimensional Location of Object Contact Based on Mechanical Signals at the Whisker Base. , 2017 .

[11]  Qiang Huang,et al.  An overview of biomimetic robots with animal behaviors , 2019, Neurocomputing.

[12]  Kyung Hyun Choi,et al.  Fully 3D Printed Multi-Material Soft Bio-Inspired Whisker Sensor for Underwater-Induced Vortex Detection. , 2018, Soft robotics.

[13]  Qiang Huang,et al.  A Modified Robotic Rat to Study Rat-Like Pitch and Yaw Movements , 2018, IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics.

[14]  GulJahan Zeb,et al.  Fully 3D Printed Multi-Material Soft Bio-Inspired Whisker Sensor for Underwater-Induced Vortex Detection. , 2018 .

[15]  D. Kleinfeld,et al.  Frisking the Whiskers Patterned Sensory Input in the Rat Vibrissa System , 2004, Neuron.

[16]  Xuedong Chen,et al.  A bioinspired touching sensor for amphibious mobile robots , 2015, Adv. Robotics.

[17]  Kwang-Seok Yun,et al.  All-polymer hair structure with embedded three-dimensional piezoresistive force sensors , 2012 .

[18]  Joseph H. Solomon,et al.  Biomechanics: Robotic whiskers used to sense features , 2006, Nature.

[19]  Chenyang Xue,et al.  Design, fabrication, and preliminary characterization of a novel MEMS bionic vector hydrophone , 2007, Microelectron. J..

[20]  Qingda Xu,et al.  Design and analysis of a multiple sensor units vector hydrophone , 2018 .

[21]  M. Diamond,et al.  Neuronal Encoding of Texture in the Whisker Sensory Pathway , 2005, PLoS biology.

[22]  Yibin Li,et al.  A novel biomimetic whisker technology based on fiber Bragg grating and its application , 2017 .

[23]  Anthony G. Pipe,et al.  Whisking with robots , 2009, IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine.

[24]  K Caluwaerts,et al.  A biologically inspired meta-control navigation system for the Psikharpax rat robot , 2012, Bioinspiration & biomimetics.

[25]  Pei Huang,et al.  A biomimetic multifunctional electronic hair sensor , 2019, Journal of Materials Chemistry A.

[26]  Nigel H. Lovell,et al.  Bio-Inspired PVDF-Based, Mouse Whisker Mimicking, Tactile Sensor , 2016 .

[27]  Michael A. Peshkin,et al.  Multifunctional Whisker Arrays for Distance Detection, Terrain Mapping, and Object Feature Extraction , 2005, Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[28]  Hiroshi Yokoi,et al.  Development of a whisker sensor system and simulation of active whisking for agent navigation , 2004, 2004 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) (IEEE Cat. No.04CH37566).

[29]  D. Simons,et al.  Biometric analyses of vibrissal tactile discrimination in the rat , 1990, The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience.

[30]  Mitra J Z Hartmann,et al.  Using hardware models to quantify sensory data acquisition across the rat vibrissal array , 2007, Bioinspiration & biomimetics.

[31]  C. Petersen.  The Functional Organization of the Barrel Cortex , 2007, Neuron.

[32]  Atsuo Takanishi,et al.  Modulation of rat behaviour by using a rat-like robot , 2013, Bioinspiration & biomimetics.