BIO-INSPIRED FLOW SENSING FOR AUTONOMOUS UNDERWATER VEHICLES; A PASSIVE SENSING DIGITAL TWIN FOR OBJECT DETECTION AND LOCALISATION

Throughout the natural world, organisms have developed numerous ways of sensing their environment, often far outperforming artificial sensors despite human technological advancements. Biomimicry can be a great path for innovation in emerging technologies, as the solutions to problems may already exist in nature. The fish lateral line system is a distributed network of neuromast sensors capable of detecting velocities, accelerations, and pressure gradients in the surrounding fluid [1]. Of particular interest to this research is flow sensing, which has the potential to enhance the capabilities of underwater vehicles to operate more effectively in challenging environments through understanding and measuring the surrounding fluid. Using the idea of a distributed sensing organ, a bio-inspired digital twin is under development, along with a signal processing algorithm to determine information about the presence of obstacles in the environment. The aim is to apply flow sensing to enhance a range of behaviours for underwater vehicles including interpreting the surroundings for obstacle detection, unsupervised decision-making, and energy harvesting. By using data from a flow simulation in a virtual environment, the digital twin can be used to investigate how passive flow sensing can categorise and localise an upstream bluff body in a flow. The proof of concept in this paper shows that a passive sensor array mounted on a vehicle downstream of a bluff body in a flow is able to detect the presence of the wake, determine the approximate size of the bluff body and provide crucial information to avoid collision.