In a work that combines a deep understanding of mollusks like worms with advances in materials and electronics, researchers from the United States and China have developed a robotic device that contains stretchable transistors with neural functions.
The researchers designed the soft neural robot with a neurologically integrated haptic sensory skin that allows it to sense its interactions with its external environment and respond accordingly.
Bill D.Cook, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Houston, said the work to develop neurorobots that can think and make judgments was an important step toward prosthetics that can connect directly to peripheral nerves in living tissue, provide neural function for prosthetics and move into soft tissue. Yu is the corresponding author of a paper describing the work, published in the journal Science Advances.
"When a person's skin is touched, you can feel it," he said, describing the new device as likely to mimic a human ability. "It starts in your brain, through neural pathways that run from your skin to your brain."
The findings have implications for neural repair as well as neuromorphic computing, an emerging technology that has the potential to process large amounts of information using small amounts of energy through devices that mimic the electrical behavior of neural networks.
Taking a cue from nature, researchers designed artificial synaptic transistors -- transistors that function like neurons -- that continue to function even when stretched by up to 50 percent. While the resulting neural function is less complex than existing ones, they say it marks an important first step toward a more powerful engineered system.
The transistor, which the researchers describe as having stretching-like properties similar to a rubber band, has functions similar to biological synapses, including excitatory postsynaptic potentials, currents, facilitation functions, and short-term and long-term memory.
The soft neurobot is equipped with a tactile sensory skin of the nervous system that senses its interactions with its external environment and responds accordingly. "Neurorobots programmatically and adaptively sense physical strokes and movements through synaptic memory encoded signals," the researchers wrote.
