Bimodal Bioinspired Sensory Neuron With Tactile and Visual Perceptual Capabilities

Most of the current bioinspired sensory neuron (BSN) focus on the single-mode sensory data, due to the problems of power supply and integration complexity when involving multimodal sensing signals. This work presents a bimodal BSN consisting of a piezoelectric nanogenerator and a photosynaptic transistor to implement the tactile-visual fusion. The PNG serving as a tactile sensor can effectively drive and modulate the photosynaptic transistor. Since there is no additional energy supply and moving parts, this bimodal BSN has low consumption but high integration level. The strengthened and modulated synaptic plasticity of the sensory neuron based on the synergistic effect of pressure and light stimuli are demonstrated. The pattern recognition results simulated by artificial neural networks confirm that multiple sense fusion with higher recognition accuracy outperforms the single sense.