$2M DARPA Award for MEMS Inertial Sensor To Revolutionize Navigation Systems
ECE Associate Professor Cristian Cassella (PI), Professor Matteo Rinaldi, Professor David Horsley, and Assistant Professor Benyamin Davaji were awarded a $2 million DARPA grant for “Enabling Higher Scale Factors in Gyroscopes Through soFt and LacAlized interface-States in microelectromecHanical resonators (FLASH).” This project aims to develop a new microelectromechanical (MEMS) inertial sensor surpassing the material-limited performance of the existing counterparts by exploiting topological properties in thin-film piezoelectric metamaterials. Apart from revolutionizing the field of inertial sensing, this project aims to demonstrate how mechanical metamaterials allow the generation of synthetic MEMS sensors able to create new avenues for using MEMS devices to table currently unaddressed challenges beyond navigation, including quantum sensing and photonics.
Military and commercial vehicles can experience an ultra-wide range of accelerations, making it extremely difficult for them to rely on existing sensor technologies for navigation and positioning in GPS-denied environments. While these sensors can withstand shocks, they do so at the expense of reduced sensitivity to small accelerations, ultimately compromising their positioning and navigation capabilities.
A research team, led by Cristian Cassella, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering (ECE), is building a microelectromechanical (MEMS) inertial sensor that is sophisticated enough to not only survive the high accelerations experienced by these vehicles, but also provide more accurate navigational data than existing devices. The technology stands to revolutionize inertial devices—sensors that measure an object’s motion—and could eventually be applied to other industries such as quantum computing and photonics.
Current inertial sensors rely on resonant modes of vibration that naturally exist in microelectromechanical systems. These modes of vibration offer inertial characteristics that are heavily limited by the mechanical properties of the adopted materials. Cassella’s team is designing and building inertial sensors with inertial properties that far exceed those of the existing sensors. The team is, for the first time, relying on the exotic properties of metamaterials in the framework of elasticity at the micrometer scale. The use of metamaterials creates a path toward achieving orders of magnitude higher sensitivities to accelerations in inertial devices so that they are inherently resilient to shock and vibration, filling a technological gap that currently hinders the use of inertial devices in military vehicles. The new sensors will be able to detect movement in very high-speed conditions, which can lead to navigation modifications and adjustments.
The inertial device will have the ability to maintain a significant resilience to shock and vibration and produce a very accurate readout by exploiting new physics within the framework of elasticity. “By relying on the concepts of elastic metamaterials at the microscale, we will show for the first time that we can create a mode of vibration that cannot be found in nature with superior gyroscopic properties,” Cassella says. “This could be the missing puzzle piece needed to ensure positioning and navigation in GPS-denied environments.”
Cassella is collaborating with Matteo Rinaldi, ECE professor and director of the Institute for NanoSystems Innovation (NanoSI), David Horsley, ECE professor and deputy director of NanoSI, and Benyamin Davaji, ECE assistant professor. “We are looking at this problem from many points of view, combining engineering, and micro-science and nanoscience expertise.”
The project is funded by a $2 million award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Cassella is applying research findings related to piezoelectric metamaterials from the National Science Foundation CAREER Award he received.
In addition to designing and building the novel MEMS inertial sensor, the team is investigating “how much the material intrinsically can withstand in terms of velocity and acceleration,” Cassella says. “We want to take this device to its limits and generate new, smarter devices.”
The new high-speed sensor could be critical to military operations, where accurate data on vehicle positioning is essential for adjusting navigation in real-time. The technology, which would be installed on airplanes, drones, and other autonomous vehicles, is being built as on-chip devices that could be mass-produced using conventional chip manufacturing processes.
Cassella notes the technology also ensures a superior degree of localization, which makes it ideal to monitor parameters changing at the single-digit micrometer scale, such as the mass of a cell. Consequently, this device could play a key role in the early detection of serious diseases like cancer using electronic devices—a global priority considering the lack of pathologists all over the world.