Scorpion-inspired pressure sensors let robots feel their surroundings

Nature, the master engineer, is coming to our rescue again. Inspired by scorpions, scientists have created new pressure sensors that are both highly sensitive and able to work across a wide variety of pressures.

Pressure sensors are key components in an array of applications, from medical devices and industrial control systems to robotics and human-machine interfaces. Silicon-based piezoresistive sensors are among the most common types used today, but they have a significant limitation. They can’t be super sensitive to changes and work well across a range of pressures at the same time. Often, you have to choose one over the other.

Nature got there before us

However, nature has already solved this problem through millions of years of evolution. So to play catch-up and design better sensors, Pinkun Wang from the Key Laboratory of Bionic Engineering (Ministry of Education) at Jilin University in China and colleagues studied the highly sensitive mechanosensory systems scorpions use to detect environmental changes. The researchers developed a way to mimic the scorpion’s pressure-sensing apparatus. These are tiny, hair-like structures known as trichobothria and the flat slits on their shell with mechanosensory neurons called slit sensilla.

The study is published in the journal Science Advances.

They built tiny stress traps to mimic the slits and flexure suppression units to act like the hairs. When placed on top of a computer chip, the stress traps greatly improved the sensor’s ability to detect even the slightest pressure. Meanwhile, on the bottom of the chip, the flexure suppression units improved sensor accuracy.

To test their concept in the real world, the researchers integrated the sensor with a deep learning network and attached it to six-legged robots. The robots were able to mimic the scorpion’s ability to sense its surroundings by detecting tiny changes in the air pressure around them.

These scorpion-bots rapidly escaped from looming cardboard boxes once they sensed the advancing objects as large “predators” and quickly moved toward small boxes they detected as “prey.”

Describing their work, the researchers wrote, “This work underscores the potential to leverage key design concepts inspired by living insects for improved sensing performance and offers structural insights for other high-precision sensors.”

These scorpion-inspired sensors are a major step toward creating more intuitive and adaptive robots. They could give intelligent robots a much better sense of their surroundings, improving collision avoidance and allowing them to work in conditions where vision is limited, such as in the dark or where there’s lots of smoke and dust. The technology also has implications for health monitoring, allowing for more precise detection of pressure signals from the body, such as a weak heartbeat or faint pulse.

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