Interfacing Real-Time Spiking I/O with the SpiNNaker neuromimetic architecture

This paper describes a closed-loop robotic system which calculates its position by means of a silicon retina sensor. The system uses an artificial neural network to determine the direction in which to move the robot in order to maintain a line-following trajectory. We introduce a pure "end to end" neural system in substitution of typical algorithms executed by a standard DSP/CPU. Computation is performed solely using spike events; from the silicon neural input sensors, through to the artificial neural network computation and motor output. At the end of the experiment the robotic system using these methods was able to follow a line consistently on a plain background.