Design, fabrication and characterisation of a biomimetic accelerometer inspired by the cricket's clavate hair

Crickets use so-called clavate hairs to sense (gravitational) acceleration to obtain information on their orientation. Inspired by this clavate hair system, a biomimetic accelerometer has been developed and fabricated using surface micromachining and SU-8 lithography. First measurements indicate that this MEMS hair-based accelerometer has a resonance frequency of 367 Hz, a detection threshold of 0.63 m/s
²
and is able to measure accelerations up to 1 g.