An Artificial Reflex Arc That Perceives Afferent Visual and Tactile Information and Controls Efferent Muscular Actions

Abstract

Neural perception and action-inspired electronics is becoming important for interactive human-machine interfaces and intelligent robots. A system that implements neuromorphic environmental information coding, synaptic signal processing, and motion control is desired. We report a neuroinspired artificial reflex arc that possesses visual and somatosensory dual afferent nerve paths and an efferent nerve path to control artificial muscles. A self-powered photoelectric synapse between the afferent and efferent nerves was used as the key information processor. The artificial reflex arc successfully responds to external visual and tactile information and controls the actions of artificial muscle in response to these external stimuli and thus emulates reflex activities through a full reflex arc. The visual and somatosensory information is encoded as impulse spikes, the frequency of which exhibited a sublinear dependence on the obstacle proximity or pressure stimuli. The artificial reflex arc suggests a promising strategy toward developing soft neurorobotic systems and prostheses.

Controlling sulfurization of 2D Mo2C crystal for Mo2C/MoS2-based memristor and artificial synapse

“…Inspired by highly connected and extremely energy-efficient biological neural system, researchers have put forward a computing system consisting of artificial neurons 1,2 , which can not only solve the bottleneck effectively that computers based on Von-Neumann architecture are facing, but lead to a generation of powerful computing paradigms 3,4 . Among various devices used for mimicking synapses, including memristors 5,6 , complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor transistors 7,8 and phase change memories 9 , memristors have been considered as one of the most promising electronic devices for neuromorphic computing owing to their intrinsic capability to remember historical states [10][11][12][13] .…”

Bio-Inspired Vision and Neuromorphic Image Processing Using Printable Metal Oxide Photonic Synapses

“…Here, the sensing-neuromorphic circuit is designed with reference to our previous work . We mimicked the visual afferent and neural communication using an improving multivibrator circuit to integrate our artificial synapses with a light-dependent sensor (Figure S5).…”

Recent Advances in Transistor-Based Bionic Perceptual Devices for Artificial Sensory Systems

“…It has great application potential in the fields of nerve repair, electronic skin, prosthesis, and so on. Sun et al (2022) firstly proposed a full reflex arc with multiple sensory-modality coding that senses visual and tactile information. It processes the information using the photoelectric synapse unit, and then sends efferent orders to control the actions of artificial muscle.…”