Publication
The human hand is a remarkable organ used every day to interact with the world. To achieve this, the hand is equipped with several sophisticated natural sensors that perceive touch, position, and temperature. Artificial systems that mimic the natural sense of touch have been developed to build more effective neuro-robotic systems, such as electronic skins (e-skins) ( 1 ). However, current approaches are still limited in their ability to fully mimic the natural tactile processing systems and to recognize different objects. On page 660 of this issue, Chen et al. ( 2 ) present an artificial tactile system that mimics the natural touch receptors and peripheral nerve-processing pathways and uses the timing of action potentials in neurons (spike timing) to enable rapid object recognition. Such highly dynamic neuromorphic tactile systems represent an important building block of future robotic and prosthetic systems.