Published paper in Frontiers in Neurorobotics: ED-BioRob: A Neuromorphic Robotic Arm With FPGA-Based Infrastructure for Bio-Inspired Spiking Motor Controllers

The Bio-inspired Circuits & Systems group is proud that a paper co-authored by Elisabetta Chicca is published in the journal Frontiers in Neurorobotics.

In the paper titled 'ED-BioRob: A Neuromorphic Robotic Arm With FPGA-Based Infrastructure for Bio-Inspired Spiking Motor Controllers' the authors investigate a new event-driven communication scheme for robotics. With this approach, similar to how neurons communicate, they reduce the communication overhead delay between signal generation and action usually found in robotics. They present the application of a classic motor control model (proportional-integral-derivative) developed with the biological spike processing principle using time enlarged spikes instead of classic PWM. A closed-loop control control was improved for the use with a dual FPGA-based system.

This approach shows a significant reduction in power consumption and can be controlled by a neuromorphic computing system. Thus, this approach bridges the gap between general purpose processing analog neuromorphic hardware and the spiking actuation of a robotic platform.