Exploration of the Design of Spiderweb-Inspired Structures for Vibration-Driven Sensing

In the quest to develop large-area soft sensors, we can look to nature for many examples. Spiderwebs show many fascinating properties that we can seek to understand and replicate in order to develop large-area, soft, and deformable sensing structures. Spiders’ webs are used not only to capture prey, but also to localize their prey through the vibrations that they feel through their legs. Inspired by spiderwebs, we developed a large-area tactile sensor for localizing contact points through vibration sensing. We hypothesize that the structure of a web can be leveraged to amplify, filter, or otherwise morphologically tune vibrations to improve sensing capabilities. To explore this design space, we created a means of computationally designing and 3D printing web structures. By using vibration sensors mounted on the edges of webs to simulate a spider monitoring vibrations, we show how varying the structural properties affects the localization performance when using vibration sensors and long short-term memory (LSTM)-based neural network classifiers. We seek to explain the classification performance seen in different webs by considering various metrics of information content for different webs and, hence, provide insight into how bio-inspired spiderwebs can be used to assist large-area sensing structures.