Bio-Inspired Flexible Sensors for Flow Field Detection

Flow field detection plays a crucial role in flying and swimming robots by providing information for navigation, active flow control, and disturbance rejection in complex fluid environments. Nature creatures have evolved flow receptors with extreme sensing performances such as fish lateral line system and sensory hairs of insects, which inspire engineers to develop artificial flow sensors. With the introduction to the high-sensitive mechanisms in fish lateral line and sensory hairs, we focus on recent progress on bio-inspired flexible sensors, which can be mounted on curved surfaces for flow field detection and analysis. The engineered sensors have reached the detection limit comparable to that of the biological receptors, which is a great breakthrough for bio-inspired sensors.