A Spiking Central Pattern Generator for the control of a simulated lamprey robot running on SpiNNaker and Loihi neuromorphic boards

01/18/2021
by   Emmanouil Angelidis, et al.
0

Central Pattern Generators (CPGs) models have been long used to investigate both the neural mechanisms that underlie animal locomotion as well as a tool for robotic research. In this work we propose a spiking CPG neural network and its implementation on neuromorphic hardware as a means to control a simulated lamprey model. To construct our CPG model, we employ the naturally emerging dynamical systems that arise through the use of recurrent neural populations in the Neural Engineering Framework (NEF). We define the mathematical formulation behind our model, which consists of a system of coupled abstract oscillators modulated by high-level signals, capable of producing a variety of output gaits. We show that with this mathematical formulation of the Central Pattern Generator model, the model can be turned into a Spiking Neural Network (SNN) that can be easily simulated with Nengo, an SNN simulator. The spiking CPG model is then used to produce the swimming gaits of a simulated lamprey robot model in various scenarios. We show that by modifying the input to the network, which can be provided by sensory information, the robot can be controlled dynamically in direction and pace. The proposed methodology can be generalized to other types of CPGs suitable for both engineering applications and scientific research. We test our system on two neuromorphic platforms, SpiNNaker and Loihi. Finally, we show that this category of spiking algorithms shows a promising potential to exploit the theoretical advantages of neuromorphic hardware in terms of energy efficiency and computational speed.

READ FULL TEXT

page 15

page 17

research
01/24/2021

Neuromorphic adaptive spiking CPG towards bio-inspired locomotion of legged robots

In recent years, locomotion mechanisms exhibited by vertebrate animals h...
research
06/08/2020

An Astrocyte-Modulated Neuromorphic Central Pattern Generator for Hexapod Robot Locomotion on Intel's Loihi

Locomotion is a crucial challenge for legged robots that is addressed "e...
research
04/25/2019

NeuroPod: a real-time neuromorphic spiking CPG applied to robotics

Initially, robots were developed with the aim of making our life easier,...
research
07/14/2020

Spiking neural state machine for gait frequency entrainment in a flexible modular robot

We propose a modular architecture for neuromorphic closed-loop control b...
research
03/17/2020

Task-Independent Spiking Central Pattern Generator: A Learning-Based Approach

Legged locomotion is a challenging task in the field of robotics but a r...
research
11/05/2016

Neuromorphic Silicon Photonic Networks

Photonic systems for high-performance information processing have attrac...
research
07/20/2020

Nengo and low-power AI hardware for robust, embedded neurorobotics

In this paper we demonstrate how the Nengo neural modeling and simulatio...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset