Main description:

Biological sensory systems, fine-tuned to their specific tasks with remarkable perfection, have an enormous potential for technical, industrial, and medical applications. This applies to sensors specialized for a wide range of energy forms such as optical, mechanical, electrical, and magnetic, to name just a few.
This book brings together first-hand knowledge from the frontiers of different fields of research in sensing. It aims to promote the interaction between biologists, engineers, physicists, and mathematicians and to pave the way for innovative lines of research and cross-disciplinary approaches. The topics presented cover a broad spectrum ranging from energy transformation and transduction processes in animal sensing systems to the fabrication and application of bio-inspired synthetic sensor arrays. The various contributions are linked by the similarity of what sensing has to accomplish in both biology and engineering.

Contents:

Preface.- I. General: 1. From biology to engineering: insect vision and applications to robotics.- 2. Nature as model for technical sensors.- II. Vision. A. Seeing: 3. Color sensing of butterflies.- 4. Insect tangential cell analogues and implications for efficient visuomotor control.- 5. Biologically inspired enhancement of dim light video.- 6. Event-based silicon retinas and cochleas.- B. Visual control: 7. The mode-sensing hypothesis: matching sensors, actuators and flight dynamics.- 8. Adaptive encoding of motion information in the fly visual system.- 9 Visual motion sensing and flight path control in flies.- III. Olfaction: 10. Cuticular hydrocarbon sensillum for nestmate recognition in ants.- 11. Fluid mechanical problems in crustacean active chemoreception.- 12. Stagnation point flow analysis of odorant detection by permeable moth antennae.- IV. Mechanoreception. A. Hearing: 13. Man made versus biological in-air sonar systems.- B. Touch: 14. Active sensing: head and vibrissal velocity during exploratory behaviors of the rat.- 15. Touch mechanoreceptors: modeling and simulating the skin and receptors to predict the timing of action potentials.- C. Medium motion: 16. Assessing the mechanical response of groups of arthropod filiform flow sensors.- D. Strain and substrate motion: 17. Spider strain detection.- 18. The golden mole middle ear: a sensor for airborne and substrate-borne vibrations.- 19. Insect inertial measurement units: gyroscopic sensing of body rotation.- V. Infrared and electro-reception: 20. Designing a fluidic infrared detector based on the photomechanic infrared sensilla in pyrophilous beetles.- 21. Remote electrical sensing: detection and analysis of objects by weakly electric fishes.- 22. Microsecond and millisecond time processing in weakly electric fishes.- VI. Bioinspired sensors, sensor materials and fabrication: 23. Synthetic materials for bio-inspired flow-responsive structures. 24. Polyelectrolyte hydrogels as electromechanical transducers.- 25. Single-molecule detection of proteins using nanopores.- 26. A numerical approach to surface plasmon resonance sensor design with high sensitivity using single and bimetallic film structures.- 27. Deflection-based flow field sensors - examples and requirements.- 28. Design and fabrication process for artificial lateral line sensors.- Index.- List of contributors.- About the editors.