ED-Scorbot: A Robotic test-bed Framework for FPGA-based Neuromorphic systems

Abstract

Neuromorphic engineering is a growing and promising discipline nowadays. Neuro-inspiration and brain understanding applied to solve engineering problems is boosting new architectures, solutions and products today. The biological brain and neural systems process information at relatively low speeds through small components, called neurons, and it is impressive how they connect each other to construct complex architectures to solve in a quasi-instantaneous way visual and audio processing tasks, object detection and tracking, target approximation, grasping…, etc., with very low power. Neuromorphs are beginning to be very promising for a new era in the development of new sensors, processors, robots and software systems that mimic these biological systems. The event-driven Scorbot (EDScorbot) is a robotic arm plus a set of FPGA / microcontroller’s boards and a library of FPGA logic joined in a completely event-based framework (spike-based) from the sensors to the actuators. It is located in Seville (University of Seville) and can be used remotely. Spike-based commands, through neuro-inspired motor controllers, can be sent to the robot after visual processing object detection and tracking for grasping or manipulation, after complex visual and audio-visual sensory fusion, or after performing a learning task. Thanks to the cascade FPGA architecture through the Address-Event-Representation (AER) bus, supported by specialized boards, resources for algorithms implementation are not limited.