Hair-based flow-sensing inspired by the cricket cercal system

Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS) offer 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-cameras) 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 hair-sensors with sub-millimeter per second flow sensing thresholds, use them in lateral line experiments, address them individually while in arrays, track transient flows, quantify viscous coupling effects and use parametric effects to achieve sharp filtering and amplification. In this research insect biologists and engineers have been working in close collaboration, generating a bidirectional flow of inforrnation and knowiedge, 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.