Naderinejad Mahdi, Junge Kai, Hughes Josie
Department of Mechanical Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran 1417935840, Iran.
CREATE Lab, IGM, STI, EPFL, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland.
Biomimetics (Basel). 2023 Mar 8;8(1):111. doi: 10.3390/biomimetics8010111.
In the quest to develop large-area soft sensors, we can look to nature for many examples. Spiderwebs show many fascinating properties that we can seek to understand and replicate in order to develop large-area, soft, and deformable sensing structures. Spiders' webs are used not only to capture prey, but also to localize their prey through the vibrations that they feel through their legs. Inspired by spiderwebs, we developed a large-area tactile sensor for localizing contact points through vibration sensing. We hypothesize that the structure of a web can be leveraged to amplify, filter, or otherwise morphologically tune vibrations to improve sensing capabilities. To explore this design space, we created a means of computationally designing and 3D printing web structures. By using vibration sensors mounted on the edges of webs to simulate a spider monitoring vibrations, we show how varying the structural properties affects the localization performance when using vibration sensors and long short-term memory (LSTM)-based neural network classifiers. We seek to explain the classification performance seen in different webs by considering various metrics of information content for different webs and, hence, provide insight into how bio-inspired spiderwebs can be used to assist large-area sensing structures.
在开发大面积柔性传感器的过程中，我们可以从自然界中找到许多例子。蜘蛛网展现出许多迷人的特性，我们可以尝试去理解并复制这些特性，以开发大面积、柔软且可变形的传感结构。蜘蛛结网不仅用于捕获猎物，还能通过腿部感受到的振动来确定猎物的位置。受蜘蛛网的启发，我们开发了一种用于通过振动传感来确定接触点位置的大面积触觉传感器。我们推测，可以利用蜘蛛网的结构来放大、过滤或以其他方式对振动进行形态调整，以提高传感能力。为了探索这个设计空间，我们创建了一种通过计算设计和3D打印蜘蛛网结构的方法。通过使用安装在网边缘的振动传感器来模拟蜘蛛监测振动的过程，我们展示了在使用振动传感器和基于长短期记忆（LSTM）神经网络分类器时，改变结构特性如何影响定位性能。我们试图通过考虑不同蜘蛛网的各种信息内容指标来解释在不同蜘蛛网中观察到的分类性能，从而深入了解受生物启发的蜘蛛网如何用于辅助大面积传感结构。
