Tactile-Olfactory Fusion in Humanoid Hand for Environmental Sensing with Fast Nonlinear Decision-Making

We report a bionic humanoid hand integrated with artificial tactile and olfactory sensor arrays to identify the environmental gases and target objects for fast nonlinear decision-making. With the algorithm inspired by Drosophila, the average recognition accuracy towards 9 kinds of gases is more than 95% within 4 s. Compared with the single sensory of tactile or olfactory, the tactile-olfactory fusion exhibits improved accuracy in complex object recognition. This sensing microsystem presents obvious nonlinear decision-making characteristics in a dilemma. It offers opportunities in the fields of humanoid robots with fast decision making for rescue missions including gas analyzing, target searching and so on.