Toward highly capable neuromorphic autonomous robots: beobots

Abstract

We describe a new mobile robotics platform specifically designed for the implementation and testing of neuromorphic vision algorithms in unconstrained outdoors environments. The new platform includes significant computational power (four 1.1GHz CPUs with gigabit interconnect), a high-speed four-wheel-drive chassis, standard Linux operating system, and a comprehensive toolkit of C++ vision classes. The robot is designed with two major goals in mind: real-time operation of sophisticated neuromorphic vision algorithms, and off-the-shelf components to ensure rapid technological evolvability. A preliminary embedded neuromorphic vision architecture that includes attentional, gist/layout, object recognition, and high-level decision subsystems is finally described.