Artificial lateral line canal for hydrodynamic detection

Abstract

Fish use their lateral line system to detect minute water motions. The lateral line consists of superficial neuromasts and canal neuromasts. The response properties of canal neuromasts differ from those of superficial ones. Here, we report the design, fabrication, and characterization of an artificial lateral line canal system. The characterization was done under various fluid conditions, including dipolar excitation and turbulent flow. The experimental results with dipole excitation match well with a mathematical model. Canal sensors also demonstrate significantly better noise immunity compared with superficial ones. Canal-type artificial lateral lines may become important for underwater flow sensing.

Artificial fish skin of self-powered micro-electromechanical systems hair cells for sensing hydrodynamic flow phenomena

“…CNs perform several unique sensory features that are not observed in SNs. Canals enhance the signal-to-noise ratio of sensing at the neuromast by separating biologically relevant signals from background noises and self-generated noises [20]. CNs are insensitive to the dc-component of the bulk water flow velocity, since these flows do not generate a pressure difference between consecutive pores of the canal and thereby do not elicit a response in the neuromast.…”

“…CNs are insensitive to the dc-component of the bulk water flow velocity, since these flows do not generate a pressure difference between consecutive pores of the canal and thereby do not elicit a response in the neuromast. The SNs and CNs, through division of labour, perform complete sensing in the frequency range 0-100 Hz without loss of sensitivity in the entire frequency range [20,21]. Figure 1 shows schematic and microscopic images of the biological SNs and CNs of the blind cave fish.…”

Biomimetic Survival Hydrodynamics and Flow Sensing

“…Inspired by the neuromasts on various species, Yang et al (2006Yang et al ( , 2011Chen et al (2007);Dagamseh et al (2012Dagamseh et al ( , 2013; Tao & Yu (2012);McConney et al (2009a), and developed MEMS-based sensors using piezo-resisitive and piezo-electric materials, resistive polymer, capacitive as well as optical methods to convert the flow-induced deflection of pillars, rods, bars or membranes to electrical signals. Figure 10 shows an artificial SN-like velocity sensor (Liu 2007).…”

Snookie: An Autonomous Underwater Vehicle with Artificial Lateral-Line System

“…Experiments with hydrophilic coatings so far did not lead to convincing results. It has already been shown experimentally by several groups that in principle detection (Martiny et al 2009;Yang et al 2011) and classification (Fernandez et al 2011) based on an artificial lateral with different sensor concepts is possible. The flow-field reconstruction requires an albeit small but carefully calibrated set of flow sensors.…”

“…The sensors are either used as surface neuromasts (Liu 2007;Hsieh et al 2011;Qualtieri et al 2011), or integrated in a canal Klein et al , 2013. Both approaches can in principle be used for dipole localisation (Nguyen et al 2011;Yang et al 2011). An extension of the cilia approach is encapsulating them with a hydrogel cupula (Peleshanko et al 2007).…”