Scientists from the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign and Illinois' Advanced Digital Sciences Centre in Singapore
have developed artificial whiskers inspired by animal whiskers that allow
robots to "see" the surroundings in dark and murky places. Whiskers are critical to many mammals to survive in
their environment.
The newly developed tactile static soft-sparse imaging
technique offers a strong alternative to existing flow-field measurement
systems. Underwater vehicles may benefit from using a whisker sensor system for
navigation around obstacles and target detection, as the flow is altered before
the actual contact .Researchers say “The unified tactile sensing approach may
potentially also be used in biomedical applications such as cardiac procedures,
in which the installation of whisker-like sensors on a thin catheter would help
a surgeon track the catheter position relative to the heart more easily, eventually
reducing the amount of risk for ablation surgeries for atrial fibrillation.”
Details of the research appears in the latest issue of
journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics
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