Despite the small distance between its ears, a female Ormia ochracea has a remarkable ability to locate male field crickets . Experimental research in [1] explains that this ability arises from the mechanical coupling between the Ormia's ears (Fig. 1) modeled as a system consisting of spring and dashpots. For more details please click here.

Fig. 1: Top: front view of the female Ormia’s ear after the head was removed. Bottom: mechanical model [1].

We proposed a beampattern design approach to achieve high performance with small-aperture arrays inspired by the Ormia’s coupled ears [2], [3]

• Solved the second order differential equations governing the Ormia’s ear response.
• Designed the biologically inspired coupling (BIC) by converting the ear response to fit the desired radio frequencies.
• Applied the BIC to the array factor of a uniform linear array.
• Included the effect of the undesired electromagnetic coupling among the antennas due to their proximity, in the array factor.
• Proposed an algorithm to optimally choose the BIC for maximum radiation performance.

The improvement in the half-power beamwidth, sidelobe suppression and directivity of the radiation pattern proves that the BIC improves the radiation performance of the antenna array.

Fig. 2: Power patterns of the uniform ordinary end-fire arrays using standard (blue) and BIC (green) for (left) d=0.1 λ , (right) d=0.25 λ interelement spacings.
Bottom halves of the figures present the half-power beamwidth.

Fig. 3: Power patterns of the binomial ordinary end-fire arrays using standard (blue) and BIC (green) for (left) d=0.1 λ , (right) d=0.25 λ interelement spacings.
Bottom halves of the figures present the half-power beamwidth.

1. R. N. Miles, D. Robert, and R. R. Hoy, "Mechanically coupled ears for directional hearing in the parasitoid fly Ormia ochracea," J. Acoust. Soc. Am., vol. 98, no. 6, pp. 3059-3070, 1995.
2. M. Akcakaya and A. Nehorai, "Biologically inspired coupled antenna beampattern design," Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, Vol. 5, pp. 1-11, Dec. 2010.
3. M. Akcakaya and A. Nehorai, "Biologically inspired coupled beampattern design," Proc. IEEE 5th Int. Waveform Diversity and Design Conf., Niagara Falls, Canada, Aug. 8-13, 2010, pp. 48-52.