Artificial tactile peripheral nervous system supported by self-powered transducers

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.