Neuromorphic Artificial Sense of Touch: Bridging Robotics and Neuroscience

摘要

The scientific knowledge on human senses such as audition and vision is well grounded as recognized by the Nobel prizes awarded in 1961 for the explanatory findings about the physiology of the cochlea, and in 1911, 1967 and 1981 for the description of optical refraction, transduction mechanisms in the eye and perceptual processes in the vision cortex, respectively. Conversely, a well-integrated theory of human tactile sensing is still lacking, i.e., the physical determinants of tactile coding and perception are not yet fully understood, and the detailed neuronal mechanisms and relative contributions of the different classes of mechanoreceptors remain to be identified [40]. For instance, agreement has not yet been reached on the most informative mechanoreceptor composition or the coding strategy (e.g., temporal, spatial, spatiotemporal, intensity) used by humans to map the different perceptual dimensions (force, roughness, softness and slipperiness) [17] of natural tactile interaction.