'Jellyfish' Smart Sensor

This SBIR program will make use of the start-of-the-art electroactive polymers and bio-inspired design of jellyfish for locomotion to develop a smart sensor that combining sensing, energy collecting, electro-elastic actuation and communication in one self-contained autonomous device. For force protection, anti-terrorism and homeland defense mission, there is an urgent need for deployable, distributed field of sensors, analogous to traditional Sonobuoys with an additional function of field persistence. This dictates orders of magnitude reduction in energy requirements to operate the sensors for the requisite operational service life (~six-months). In order to reach this goal, Strategic Polymer Sciences, Inc. (SPS) will develop bio-inspired jellyfish smart sensors in which the electroactive polymer generated shape change will be employed for the locomotion of jellyfish smart sensors, which will markedly reduce the energy requirement for the locomotion and station keep. Recent experimental results also demonstrated that by integrating electroactive polymers with smart electronics, a much higher energy harvesting efficiency can be achieved. In this SBIR program, SPS will integrate these technologies to develop the proposed smart sensors. In Phase I of this program, SPS will develop detailed design and simulation to determine the performance of the jellyfish smart sensors.