Carbon nano artificial neuron system for flexible tactile sensing

This paper introduces an ongoing study to development a novel flexible tactile sensing system. The tactile system is consisted of the array of flexible sensors having piezoresistivity. To achieve flexibility and high sensitivity, the flexible sensors have been developed with smart nanocomposites. The smart nanocomposites are fabricated with multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) and graphene oxide (GO). The piezo-resistive characteristics of the sensors show fairy linear strain sensing with gauge factor range from 1~300 with respect to various strain range (~ 0.4%). The GO based strain sensor shows impact response over 0.09kg m/s which can sufficiently detect small contact forces. The long and flexible sensor can be considered to be a continuous sensor like a dendrite of a neuron in the human body and we named the sensor as a biomimetic artificial neuron. To mimic tactile system, we design ANMS (Artificial Neuron Matrix System) consisting the array of neurons and develop tactile algorithm to localize the contact information with a signal processing system.