Preliminary Study on The Design of A Silicon Bio-inspired MEMS Gyroscope

Micromachined gyroscopes for measuring rate or angle of rotation have attracted a lot of attention during the past few years for several applications. They are widely used to detect orientation in space, including automotive applications for ride stabilization and rollover detection; some consumer electronic applications, such as video-camera stabilization, virtual reality, and inertial mouse for computers; robotics applications; and a wide range of military applications. This paper is our first report on an on-going work to build a MEMS gyroscope inspired from a natural “gyroscope”, i.e. the Drosophila haltere. Halteres are small evolutionarily modified hind wings, which beat antiphase to the wings and serve a purely sensory function during flight. The halteres are very sensitive to Coriolis forces and potentially provide an accurate measure of angular velocity which originate from angular rotations of the body and mediate corrective reflexes during flight. Our preliminary work is to model and develop the biomimetics MEMS gyroscope based on the structure of the halteres. A new generation biomimetics MEMS gyroscope was used as the starting point. Several options and stages of possible structural implementations in Silicon are presented. In order to approach the performance of the original biological structure, the structure with a standing silicon post bonded to the center of the substrate mass will be modeled and discussed. We also found that when the gyroscope rotates, the mass suspending beams will be tensile-stressd, compressed and bended according to the fly’s campaniform sensilum inspired Coriolis acceleration. Based on our previous work, the membrane-in-recess microstructure will then be used for the mass suspending beams of the gyroscope structure to enable more sensitive strain detection, so that higher sensitivity Coriolis acceleration detection can be obtained. Keywords— Bio-inspired, Gyroscope, MEMS, Biomimetics