October 19, 2006

Robotic whiskers can sense 3-D environment

By Megan Fellman

Many mammals use their whiskers to explore their environment and to construct a three-dimensional image of their world. Rodents, for example, use their whiskers to determine the size, shape and texture of objects, and seals use their whiskers to track the fluid wakes of their prey.

Two Northwestern engineers have been studying the whisker system of rats to better understand how mechanical information from the whiskers gets transmitted to the brain and to develop artificial whisker arrays for engineering applications.

Mitra J. Hartmann, assistant professor of biomedical engineering and mechanical engineering in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, and Joseph H. Solomon, one of Hartmann’s graduate students, have now developed arrays of robotic whiskers that sense in two dimensions, mimicking the capabilities of mammalian whiskers. They demonstrate that the arrays can sense information about both object shape and fluid flow.

A paper about the arrays, which may find application on assembly lines, in pipelines or on land-based autonomous rovers or underwater vehicles, was published in the Oct. 5 issue of the journal Nature.

“We show that the bending moment, or torque, at the whisker base can be used to generate three-dimensional spatial representations of the environment,” said Hartmann. “We used this principle to make arrays of robotic whiskers that in many respects closely replicate rat whiskers.” The technology, she said, could be used to extract the three-dimensional features of almost any solid object.