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 neurons many-to-many synaptic connections. Inspired by structural natural system, we report a supersensitive artificial slowly adapting afferent based on triboelectric nanogenerator technology. Using tribotronic transistors design mechanoreceptors, exhibits typical behaviours biological counterpart response to mechanical stimulations. self-powered transduction event-driven operation. Moreover, it has inherent proficiency neuromorphic signal processing, delivering minimum resolvable dimension two times smaller than inter-receptor distance lower limit that existing electronic skins can resolve. These results open up route scalable aiming at level human’s exceptional perception neurorobotic neuroprosthetic applications.