Biologcally Inspired Design: Blurring the Boundary Between Sensors and Actuators

All moving systems must acquire information from their surroundings and subsequently process, store, or transmit that information to effect control. That information processing orchestrates motor commands that activate a complex suite of muscles that, in turn, control the movement of actuators and skeletal elements. Animal motion, therefore, represents a highly coupled system with sensors, actuators and mechanical transmission systems interacting with external environmental forces to determine behavior and kinematics of movement. This is particularly evident in the control and dynamics of insect flight, the focus of this paper. We review three case studies of inertial sensing mechanisms in insect flight and suggest biologically inspired design concepts for new methods of inertial information encoding