Energy scavenging artificial nervous system for detecting rotational movement

The human sensory nervous system recognizes the change in the external environment and transmits the information to the brain. The brain uses information from the vestibular system in the head, which plays a vital role in the multisensory recognition of balance and orientation. The mimicking of human neural network systems based on biological synapses has emerged as a key technology in bioinspired electronics. This study emulates an energy scavenging artificial nervous system for detecting rotational movement to mimic the functions and mechanisms of the biological semicircular canals. Synaptic transistors realize the biological synaptic plasticity, which can be used to simulate short-to long-term memory transitions and learning processes. Furthermore, by integrating synaptic transistors with triboelectric rotation sensors, we have demonstrated that our artificial nervous system is able to detect rotational movements on the coordinates in real time. This artificial nervous system has promising applications including neurorobotics, soft electronics, and neuroprosthetics.