Pattern and frequency generation using an opto-electronic reservoir computer with output feedback

Abstract

Reservoir Computing is a bio-inspired computing paradigm for processing time dependent signals. The performance of its analogue implementations matches other digital algorithms on a series of benchmark tasks. Their potential can be further increased by feeding the output signal back into the reservoir, which would allow to apply the algorithm to time series generation. This requires, in principle, implementing a sufficiently fast readout layer for real-time output computation. Here we achieve this with a digital output layer driven by an FPGA chip. We demonstrate the first opto-electronic reservoir computer with output feedback and test it on two examples of time series generation tasks: pattern and frequency generation. The good results we obtain open new possible applications for analogue Reservoir Computing.