Seal Whisker-Inspired Sensor for Amplifying Wake-Induced Vibrations in Underwater Marine Animal Monitoring

Abstract: Underwater marine animal monitoring is essential for assessing biodiversity, evaluating ecosystem health, and understanding the effects of offshore structures. Traditional approaches such as tagging, sonar, and camera systems are often invasive, energy-intensive, or limited by poor visibility and water turbidity. Inspired by the hydrodynamic sensing of seal whiskers, wavy whisker vibration sensors have been developed for flow velocity and angle-of-attack detection. However, most prior work has focused on sensor characterization and only forward modeling, with limited exploration of the inverse problem of inferring animal movement. Moreover, current sensor sensitivity to vortex street wakes generated by swimming animals remains insufficient for practical monitoring. To address this gap, we develop a whisker-inspired sensor with a spiral-perforated base that amplifies vibrations within frequency ranges relevant to animal-induced wakes. We further characterize the influence of spiral parameters on the sensitive frequency band, enabling adaptation of the design to specific species. We evaluated the amplification effect of the spiral-perforated design using frequency response simulations of the whisker-base structure under harmonic water pressure. Results show up to 51x enhancement in root mean squared displacement at the target sensor location within frequency bands associated with animal-induced wakes compared to the baseline design, confirming the effectiveness of the amplification.