Crickets as bio-inspiration for MEMS-based flow-sensing

MEMS offers exciting possibilities for the fabrication of bio-inspired mechanosensors. Over the last few years, we have been working on cricket- inspired hair-sensor arrays for spatio-temporal flow-field observations (i.e. flow camera) and source localisation. 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, track transient flows, and use non-linear effects to achieve parametric filtering and amplification. In this research, insect biologists and engineers have been working in close collaboration, generating a bidirectional flow of information and knowledge, beneficial to both, for example, 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.