Integrated Sensing: Biomimetic Sensors for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

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Water covers approximately 70% of the earth surface. However, this majority of the planet is under-explored and poorly understood. This is largely a result of the significant challenge posed by the underwater environment, with its high pressure, unpredictable currents, nearly freezing temperatures, attenuation of electromagnetic waves and light, and harsh chemical compositions. A variety of scientific, military and industrial tasks call for tools that function in the ocean environment. Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) are important platforms for carrying out sophisticated underwater tasks. Currently some tasks are not suitable for AUVs due to technical limitations. More advanced applications demand small, integrated, power efficient and potentially networked AUVs to increase the effectiveness and reduce the costs. A key step in moving toward this vision is improved sensors for AUVs. This project aims to develop integrated underwater sensors inspired by the fish lateral line system. Prototypes of sensors will be built and used to investigate the fluid mechanical behavior of such sensors through computational and experimental means. The potential applications include the detection of hydrodynamic wakes, tracing of chemical plumes, and determination of hydrodynamic properties at the interface of fluid and structures. The proposed effort will focus on one problem - that of detection of hydrodynamic wakes.Planned research activities consists of three integral components: (1) The development and improvement of biomimetic integrated microsensors; (2) The validation and prediction of sensor performance using full scale direct numerical simulation and reduced-model simulation; (3) The experimental validation of sensor performance and computational results.