An Iontronic Bimodal Afferent Nerve for Cross‐Modal Neuromorphic Fusion and Robotic Sorting

Inspired by the multisensory perception and fusion strategy of the biological tactile system, we present a bimodal iontronic afferent nerve that integrates a flexible pressure-temperature sensor patch, pulse-encoding electronics, an electrolyte-gated synaptic transistor and a dual-branch neuromorphic classification framework. The flexible sensor patch enables pressure and temperature perception over broad ranges, covering mechanical stimuli from 0 to 300 kPa and thermal stimuli from 0°C to 80°C. Rather than functioning as an isolated sensor, the system converts mechanical and thermal tactile cues into unified iontronic/spiking representations, enabling neuromorphic encoding, synaptic modulation and cross-modal feature fusion. By integrating pressure and temperature features through a dual-branch neuromorphic network, the system achieves 92.00% accuracy under within-recording contiguous-block validation with dual-feature fusion and outperforming single-modal classification. Finally, the integrated afferent nerve is applied to feed-forward robotic tactile sorting, where objects with different color-derived thermal states and mechanical stiffness are identified and classified. This work demonstrates a flexible bimodal neuromorphic tactile system capable of sensing, encoding, fusing and acting on multimodal tactile information, providing a promising route toward artificial skin for intelligent robotic perception.