Steel whiskers that mimic the way seals and rats sense prey could one day give planetary rovers the sensitivity they need to explore the shape of strange objects they encounter on their travels.
That鈥檚 the suggestion of Joe Solomon and Mitra Hartmann at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who have developed delicate whiskers in both steel and plastic that can accurately sense shapes and textures.
Other whisker-like shape sensors have relied on complex software to crunch information on the position of each whisker tip and its movement over time. But Solomon and Hartmann wondered if it would be simpler to use the 鈥渂ending moment鈥� at the base of each whisker. They think that this might be closer to the way rats combine information from different whiskers to sense shapes, and how seals detect the changes in water flow that lead them to their prey.
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The team built an array of four springy stainless steel whiskers and fitted each with four strain gauges around their base to measure the bending moments. Like rats assessing a texture, they rotated the whiskers against a small sculpted head.
The variety of bending moments they captured allowed them to 鈥渇aithfully extract the sculpture鈥檚 original smooth surface shape鈥� and reproduce it on a computer, the pair report in Nature (vol 443, p 525).
They had similar success using plastic whiskers to profile flow patterns under water. Such whiskers could allow autonomous underwater vehicles to track moving objects by their wake.
