Objective In unstructured scenarios such as nighttime operation, underground environments, disaster rescue, and dusty or smoky industrial sites, imaging-based vision is severely degraded by insufficient illumination and scattering media, leading to reduced recognition confidence or even failure. Tactile perception is illumination-independent and can provide reliable local mechanical cues, yet it is intrinsically limited in spatial coverage. Therefore, hardware-level visuo-tactile fusion with low power consumption is highly desirable for robust perception in low-light environments.

Methods A self-powered biomimetic neuromorphic system for near-infrared (NIR) vision–tactile fusion perception was developed, in which a flexible triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) was integrated with a floating-gate optoelectronic synaptic device (Fig.1). In the optoelectronic synaptic device, PbS quantum dots were introduced as an NIR-absorbing photosensitive charge-trapping layer, enabling NIR photoexcitation to be converted into retainable trapped charges in the floating gate. To realize self-powered tactile input, the TENG was fabricated based on a flexible PDMS elastomer and Ag nanowire electrodes, and a PDMS/MXene composite triboelectric layer was incorporated to generate high-amplitude voltage pulse. The TENG output pulses were directly used as gate-modulation signals for the synaptic device to enable event triggering and current-based weight updates.

Results and Discussion  The device performance was systematically compared under dark conditions and under 850nm near-infrared illumination, with particular emphasis on key neuromorphic metrics including bidirectional voltage-sweep hysteresis, excitatory postsynaptic current (EPSC) responses, and the linearity of current-based weight updates. The results show that NIR stimulation increases the on-state current by approximately 259% while reducing the off-state current by about 68% (Fig.3(a)), thereby significantly expanding the current dynamic range. Under multi-pulse excitation, the EPSC peak rises by about 81% and the nonlinearity decreases by about 50% (Fig.4(d)), demonstrating NIR-enhanced synaptic responses and improved linearity of conductance modulation. Meanwhile, upon tactile stimulation, the triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) delivers a short-circuit current of 4.7 μA, an open-circuit voltage of 75 V, and a transferred charge of 37 nC (Fig.2(d)), which can reliably support repeated weight-update operations.

Conclusions By co-designing a PbS-QD floating-gate infrared optoelectronic synaptic device and a flexible TENG, this work demonstrates a self-powered biomimetic multimodal neuromorphic system capable of NIR “visual” sensing, tactile self-powered input, and hardware-level spatiotemporal fusion with synaptic plasticity. The proposed SP-BMNS offers a feasible device–system paradigm for robust low-light perception and edge intelligence, with potential applications in low-illumination target recognition, robotic electronic skin, wearable human–machine interaction, and ambient interactive sensing nodes.