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.