A biomimetic eye with a hemispherical perovskite nanowire array retina

Abstract

Human eyes possess exceptional image sensing characteristics such as spectacularly wide field of view (FOV), high resolution and sensitivity with low aberration. Biomimetic eyes with the same superior characteristics are highly desirable in many technological applications. However, the spherical nature of biological eyes, particularly the core component of retina, poses an enormous challenge for fabrication of biomimetic eyes. Herein, we demonstrate a unique biomimetic electrochemical eye using a hemispherical retina made of high-density array of nanowires mimicking photoreceptors on a real retina. The device design has a high degree of structural similarity to a real human eye with potency to achieve a high imaging resolution when individual nanowires are electrically addressed. Meanwhile, image sensing function of our biomimetic eye device is also demonstrated. The work here may lead to a new generation of photosensing and imaging devices based on a bioinspired design that can benefit a wide spectrum of technological applications.

Recent Advances in Vertically Aligned Nanowires for Photonics Applications

“…Likewise, vertical nanowire arrays have been considered as an alternative way to demonstrate the artificial retina [ 118 , 119 , 120 ]. Gu et al successfully implemented the biomimetic visual system, which has nearly perfect hemispherical retina with high-density artificial photoreceptors using perovskite nanowires inside of a curved porous aluminum oxide membrane (PAM) [ 121 ]. ( Figure 7 a,b) On the other hand, in Figure 7 c, as a means for restoring the degraded photoreceptor cells, gold nanoparticle-decorated titania (Au-TiO 2 ) nanowire arrays were implanted in blind mice without electrodes.…”

“…( f ) White light response (top) and reconstructed response (bottom) from red, green and blue images. ( a , b ) reprinted by permission from Springer Nature: Springer Nature [ 121 ], Copyright 2020; ( c ) reprinted by permission from Springer Nature: Springer Nature Communications [ 122 ], Copyright 2018; ( d – f ) reprinted from [ 63 ], with permission from Wiley.…”

Microfluidic-assisted 3D-printed eye (MAP-eye): a biomimetic ommatidium array with direct full-colour 3D to 2D panoramic imaging and position tracking

“…Deformable optoelectronics, in which an array of photodetectors are curved to match to a compound eye [36][37][38][39], provide a potential solution for the aforementioned matching problem; however, the entire system relies on complex optical-to-electrical conversion and tedious signal readout strategies which are incapable of producing full-colour imaging. Moreover, the deformable curvature and the density of the electrical contacts limits the size and the imaging quality of the compound eye [17].…”

“…The resulting outstanding visual performance enabled by this compound design has been widely exploited for a diverse range of applications such as endoscopic examination [8], robot navigation [9,10], and surveillance [11]. Natural compound eyes have inspired various optical systems with artificial microlens arrays [12][13][14][15][16][17][18], and a significant amount of research has been devoted to improving the fabrication and design of these systems.…”

Switchable Perovskite Photovoltaic Sensors for Bioinspired Adaptive Machine Vision

“…Many efforts have been made to emulate the neurobiological functionalities of human eyes, among which materials scientists contribute a lot to achieve individual demonstrations of image sensing and preprocessing for image-contrast enhancement or noise reduction with highly sensitive semiconductor photodetectors, [10][11][12] as well as pattern recognition through memristive neural network to realize compact and more efficient machine vision for mobile yet delay-sensitive applications. [13][14][15][16][17] A better solution is to redesign the hardware systems to assemble these separate functions into an all-in-one platform, [18,19] wherein the development of switchable photodetectors that can simultaneously sense the visual information in complex environments in a tunable and high-fidelity manner, as well as perform instant and energy-efficient image processing tasks in situ in the sensory array with less or even no delays, is of high demand for user-end AI apparatus.…”