Related papers: Bioinspired Tapered-Spring Turbulence Sensor for U…
Underwater flow sensing is critical for unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) and environmental monitoring, yet existing sensors often suffer from low responsiveness, high detection thresholds, limited directional discrimination, complex…
This research develops a novel sensor for aquatic robots inspired by the whiskers of harbor seals. This sensor can detect the movement of water, offering valuable data on speed, currents, barriers, and water disturbance. It employs a…
Underwater marine animal monitoring is essential for assessing biodiversity, evaluating ecosystem health, and understanding the effects of offshore structures. Traditional approaches such as tagging, sonar, and camera systems are often…
Blindfolded harbor seals are able to use their uniquely shaped whiskers to track vortex wakes left by moving animals and objects that passed by up to 30 seconds earlier; this is an impressive feat as the flow features they detect may have…
Sensing the flow of water or air disturbance is critical for the survival of many animals: flow information helps them localize food, mates, and prey and to escape predators. Across species, many flow sensors take the form of long, flexible…
Bio-inspired whisker sensors are employed in diverse applications such as fluid-flow sensing, texture analysis, and environmental exploration. However, existing designs often face challenges related to durability, fabrication complexity,…
Aquatic mammals, such as pinnipeds, utilize their whiskers to detect and discriminate objects and analyze water movements, inspiring the development of robotic whiskers for sensing contacts, surfaces, and water flows. We present the design…
Flow sensing is fundamental to both biological survival and technological innovation. Inspired by biological mechanoreceptors, artificial flow sensors detect subtle fluid motion using slender, viscous-driven structures. Among these,…
This paper shows analytical and experimental evidence of using the vibration dynamics of a compliant whisker for accurate terrain classification during steady state motion of a mobile robot. A Hall effect sensor was used to measure whisker…
Flapping-based propulsive systems rely on fluid-structure interactions to produce thrust. At intermediate and high Reynolds numbers, vortex formation and organization in the wake of such systems are crucial for the generation of a…
Reconstruction of unsteady vortical flow fields from limited sensor measurements is challenging. We develop machine learning methods to reconstruct flow features from sparse sensor measurements during transient vortex-airfoil wake…
My research objective is to explicitly bridge the gap between high computational performance and low power dissipation of robot on-board hardware by designing a bio-inspired tapered whisker neuromorphic computing (also called reservoir…
Texture-based studies and designs have been in focus recently. Whisker-based multidimensional surface texture data is missing in the literature. This data is critical for robotics and machine perception algorithms in the classification and…
Robotic systems show significant promise for water environmental sensing applications such as water quality monitoring, pollution mapping and biodiversity data collection. Conventional deployment methods often disrupt fragile ecosystems,…
Understanding airflow around a drone is critical for performing advanced maneuvers while maintaining flight stability. Recent research has worked to understand this flow by employing 2D and 3D flow sensors to measure flow from a single…
Following a recent demonstration of stable trapping of floating particles by stationary (monochromatic) structured water waves [Nature 638, 394 (2025)], we report dynamic water-wave tweezers that enable controllable transport of trapped…
The acoustofluidic method holds great promise for manipulating microorganisms. When exposed to the steady vortex structures of acoustic streaming flow, these microorganisms exhibit intriguing dynamic behaviors, such as hydrodynamic trapping…
Unmanned underwater vehicles are increasingly employed for maintenance and surveying tasks at sea, but their operation in shallow waters is often hindered by hydrodynamic disturbances such as waves, currents, and turbulence. These unsteady…
Tiny flying robots hold great potential for search-and-rescue, safety inspections, and environmental monitoring, but their small size limits conventional sensing-especially with poor-lighting, smoke, dust or reflective obstacles. Inspired…
Pinnipeds like seals and sea lions use their whiskers in hunting their prey in dark and turbid conditions. There is no theoretical model or a hypothesis to explain the interaction of whiskers with hydrodynamic fish trails. The present work…