A capacitive biominetic whisker sensor is designed and experimented to imitate the exquisite environment sensibility of animal whiskers to the world.The sensor takes an electret microphone as its sensing organ and a fiber as its whisker material to measure slender stimuli acting upon the tip of whisker.The principle

structure

signal preprocessing circuits and properties of the whisker sensor are all presented.Experimental results show that the sensor has a favorable repetition

static characteristic and linearity

and can adequately reflect the surface feature of a scanned object

so it is suitable for the recognition of object profiles and surface textures

and can be applied in autonomous obstacle avoidance of robots.