Sharing the skies

Abstract

Hodson talks about making robot brain more like human brains. Now a neuroscience and robotics start-up called Neurala in Cambridge MA has built robot brains using GPUs. It says they run roughly 10 times as fast as those built on CPUs. He watched a software simulation at the Neuromorphics Lab at Boston University. A virtual rover is given a basic route across the surface of a digital Mars and it sets off without hesitation, spotting the rocks in its way as it goes. The robots brain processes visual information in real time, enabling it to do more than simply navigate from one spot to another. This means robots could one day be trusted to make their own decisions when navigating changing terrain on Mars.