Biomimetic hairy affective-touch sensory AI interface

The absence of tactile emotion perception limits artificial intelligence (AI) in decoding social behaviors encoded in human physical contact. Here, a biomimetic hairy sensing interface is developed to capture affective touch’s spatiotemporal characteristics and intrinsic features, allowing for accurate emotion recognition. The hairy interface directly induces neuromimetic electric pulse signals under external stimuli without the need for a spike coding circuit. Through a bistage hairy structure, homogeneous nanomesh manufacturing process and isoline theory, it achieves high force detection sensitivity (0.67 N-1) and spatial precision (1.61 mm localization accuracy across 100 cm2). The interface replicates biological C-LTMRs’ behavior, establishing the first bioelectronic analog of affective touch transduction. Integration with hybrid neural network setting (convolutional neural network and contextual large language model) enables real-time emotion recognition with 82.37% accuracy across individualized touch patterns. This neuromorphic tactile framework facilitates the closed-loop human-AI emotional interaction, advancing toward humanoid robots capable of natural affective communication. Current artificial intelligence lacks the ability to perceive the emotions conveyed through human touch. Here, the study develops a bio-inspired hairy electronic skin that can recognize emotions from touch, facilitating natural affective communication for robots.