Micromachined Biomimetic Sensor Using Modular Artificial Hair Cells

Integrated micro sensors, enabled by the advancement in the semiconductor microfabrication technology and MEMS (Micro Electromechanical Systems), have been under dynamic development for the past two decades. While integrated sensors hold great promises, the development of such sensors incurs formidably high cost (millions of dollars) and long development cycles (on the order of years). A fundamental cause for the inefficiency lies in the fact that the sensor field is highly fragmented with one specific sensor covering only a relatively narrow and fixed spectrum of performance characteristics, and that different sensors rarely share a common set of design, materials, fabrication, and packaging technology with others. The high cost of sensor development hinders the progress of applying high performance integrated sensors for space-related robotics applications.