Abstract:
Many mammals, such as rats and seals, use their whiskers as versatile mechanical sensors to gain precise information about their surroundings. Whisker-inspired sensors on robotic platforms have shown their potential benefit, improving applications ranging from drone navigation to texture mapping. Despite this, there is a gap between the engineered sensors and many of the advantageous natural abilities of whiskers. Two missing abilities are estimating contact location through whisker forces and differentiating between multiple mechanical stimuli. In this work, I propose two related whisker sensor designs to accomplish these unmet abilities. Another challenge I address is scalability: biomimicry and robotic applications require a dense array of whiskers. Implementing computer vision techniques to the whiskers design improves our ability to monitor larger whisker arrays. One sensor design advances contact localization along the whisker length using base measurements. The other sensor design measures and differentiates between contact, airflow, and system motion on a whisker array, demonstrating a novel ability for engineered whiskers.

Committee:
Prof. Sarah Bergbreiter (advisor)
Prof. Zeynep Temel
Prof. Wenzhen Yuan
Jiahe Liao