Abstract
The tactile peripheral nervous system innervating human hands, which is essential for sensitive haptic exploration and dexterous object manipulation, features overlapped receptive fields in the skin, arborization of peripheral neurons and many-to-many synaptic connections. Inspired by the structural features of the natural system, we report a supersensitive artificial slowly adapting tactile afferent nervous system based on the triboelectric nanogenerator technology. Using tribotronic transistors in the design of mechanoreceptors, the artificial afferent nervous system exhibits the typical adapting behaviours of the biological counterpart in response to mechanical stimulations. The artificial afferent nervous system is self-powered in the transduction and event-driven in the operation. Moreover, it has inherent proficiency of neuromorphic signal processing, delivering a minimum resolvable dimension two times smaller than the inter-receptor distance which is the lower limit of the dimension that existing electronic skins can resolve. These results open up a route to scalable neuromorphic skins aiming at the level of human’s exceptional perception for neurorobotic and neuroprosthetic applications.
Highlights
A tactile afferent nervous system is essential to achieving the human capability in haptic exploration, tender touching, proprioception and dexterous object manipulation
Electronic skins (e-skins) innervated with an artificial afferent nervous system are indispensable for emerging anthropomorphic neurorobotics and neuroprosthetics [1,2,3]
We report a hardware-based biomimetic artificial slowly adapting type I (SA-I) tactile peripheral nervous systems (TPNSs) that is characterized by super-high response sensitivity and facilitates energy-efficient neuromorphic computation
Summary
A tactile afferent nervous system is essential to achieving the human capability in haptic exploration, tender touching, proprioception and dexterous object manipulation. The extraordinary tactile perception and the rapid sensorimotor reactions are largely ascribed to the distributed, parallel and event-driven computation based on spatiotemporal spike train (action potentials) in a biological nervous system. A transducer based on triboelectric effects, i.e. tribo electric nanogenerator (TENG) [24,25,26,27,28,29,30], is connected to the gate elec trode of a transistor This implementation completes a circuit in analogue to a SA-I mechanoreceptor, i.e. the Merkel cell-neurite com plex distributed superficially in the skin (Fig. 1A). The TMR is supersensitive owning to its unique capability of responding to approaching objects prior to physical con tact It is self-powered during mechano-electric transduction through converting mechanical energy into electric signals. Map of force distribution with a minimum resolvable dimension 2 times smaller than that of the aforementioned state-of-the-art electronic skins, i.e., the minimum inter-receptor distance
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