"The nervous system does an astonishing job of tracking sensory information, and does so using signals that would drive many computer scientists insane: a noisy stream of activity spikes that may be transmitted to hundreds of additional neurons, where they are integrated with similar spike trains coming from still other neurons. Now, researchers have used spiking circuitry to build an artificial robotic skin, adopting some of the principles of how signals from our sensory neurons are transmitted and integrated."
"All of this started out by making a flexible polymer skin with embedded pressure sensors that were linked up to the rest of the system via conductive polymers. The next layer of the system converted the inputs from the pressure sensors to a series of activity spikes-short pulses of electrical current. There are three ways that these trains of spikes can convey info"
Flexible polymer skin with embedded pressure sensors was fabricated and connected via conductive polymers to downstream electronics. Sensor outputs were converted into trains of short electrical pulses (spikes). The system focuses on pressure sensing while implementing neural principles including layered processing, spatial localization of touch, and injury detection. Spiking signals are noisy and distributed to many integrative units, matching biological strategies. Compatibility with chips that run spiking neural networks enables low-energy integration with AI-based control. Implementation includes some non-neural components but preserves the efficiency and architecture advantages of spiking communication for robotic skin.
Read at Ars Technica
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