Bio-inspired Technical Vibrissae for Quasi-static Profile Scanning

A passive vibrissa (whisker) is modeled as an elastic bending rod that interacts with a rigid obstacle in the plane. Aim is to determine the obstacle’s profile by one quasi-static sweep along the obstacle. To this end, the non-linear differential equations emerging from Bernoulli’s rod theory are solved analytically followed by numerical evaluation. This generates in a first step the support reactions, which represent the only observables an animal solely relies on. In a second step, these observables (possibly made noisy) are used for a reconstruction algorithm in solving initial-value problems which yield a series of contact points (discrete profile contour).