Resource-efficient bio-inspired visual processing on the hexapod walking robot HECTOR.

Journal: PloS one
Published Date: Apr 1, 2020

Abstract

Emulating the highly resource-efficient processing of visual motion information in the brain of flying insects, a bio-inspired controller for collision avoidance and navigation was implemented on a novel, integrated System-on-Chip-based hardware module. The hardware module is used to control visually-guided navigation behavior of the stick insect-like hexapod robot HECTOR. By leveraging highly parallelized bio-inspired algorithms to extract nearness information from visual motion in dynamically reconfigurable logic, HECTOR is able to navigate to predefined goal positions without colliding with obstacles. The system drastically outperforms CPU- and graphics card-based implementations in terms of speed and resource efficiency, making it suitable to be also placed on fast moving robots, such as flying drones.

Authors

  • Hanno Gerd Meyer
    Research Group Biomechatronics, CITEC, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany.
  • Daniel Klimeck
    Cognitronics and Sensor Systems Group, CITEC, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany.
  • Jan Paskarbeit
    Research Group Biomechatronics, CITEC, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany.
  • Ulrich Rückert
    Cognitronics and Sensor Systems Group, CITEC, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany.
  • Martin Egelhaaf
    Department of Neurobiology and CITEC, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany.
  • Mario Porrmann
    Computer Engineering Group, Osnabrück University, Osnabrück, Germany.
  • Axel Schneider
    Research Group Biomechatronics, CITEC, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany.

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