A Habituation Sensory Nervous System with Memristors

The sensory nervous system (SNS) builds up the association between external stimuli and the response of organisms. In this system, habituation is a fundamental characteristic that filters out irrelevantly repetitive information and makes the SNS adapt to the external environment. To emulate this critical process in electronic devices, a LixSiOy-based memristor (TiN/LixSiOy/Pt) is developed where the temporal response under repetitive stimulation is similar to that of habituation. By connecting this synaptic device to a leaky integrate-and-fire neuron based on a Ag/SiO2:Ag/Au memristor, a fully memristive SNS with habituation is experimentally demonstrated. Finally, a habituation spiking neural network based on the SNS is built and its application in obstacle avoidance for robot navigation is successfully presented. The results provide that a direct emulation of the biologically inspired learning process by memristors could be a sound choice for neuromorphic hardware implementation.