Hardware Feedback Self-Organizing Map and its Application to Mobile Robot Location Identification

Abstract

We propose new hardware architecture for the self-organizing map (SOM) and feedback SOM (FSOM). Due to the parallel structure in the SOM and FSOM algorithm, customized hardware considerably speeds-up processing. Proposed hardware FSOM identifies the location of a mobile robot from a sequence of direction data. The FSOM is self-trained to cluster data to identify where the robot is. The proposed FSOM design is described in C and VHDL, and its performance is tested by simulation using actual sensor data from an experimental mobile robot. Results show that the hardware FSOM succeeds in self-learning to find the robot’s location. The hardware FSOM is estimated to process 6,992 million weight-vector elements per second.