A broad range of inter-disciplinary techniques will be developed to enable the use of cockroaches as a sensory platform, increase our understanding of cockroach behavior, growth of nanocrystalline piezoelectric sensors, and extreme low power electronics to condition and communicate the sensed data to a base station. Nanocrystalline piezoelectric structures are grown in a novel manner and will be used to create strain sensors which can be applied in a wide range of applications. In this project the focus is using these sensors to detect and study the locomotion of an American cockroach and develop the cockroach as a sensory platform. The diminutive size of the insects demands an ability to design circuits which operate at extreme low power levels (and thereby require extremely small and light power sources). The broader application of these techniques will be in the area of hand-held, portable and wearable computers. A prototype sensor system will be developed that will be mounted on a cockroach, sensing and communicating information such as cockroach locomotion as well as environmental lighting and electro-magnetic noise conditions.
An interdisciplinary team of researchers from the areas of entomology, materials science and low-power electronic circuit design and design automation are participating. The proposed research project is expected to have an impact on the field of sensing, signal transfer, nanofabrication, entomology and low-power electronics. Attaching small piezoelectric strain sensors at strategic locations on a cockroach to produce a small amount of energy as the insect moves is a unique combination. Power consumption has been identified as one of the important hurdles for future VLSI designs, and hence this proposal addresses a pertinent design problem. The approach in this proposal, with its 100- 500X power reduction, may prove invaluable to the continued success of low power sensor networks and portable / wearable communication and computation devices.
