An AER to CAN bridge for spike-based robot control

Abstract

Address-Event-Representation (AER) is a bio-inspired communication protocol between chips. A set of AER sensors (retina and cochleas), processors (convolvers, WTA, mappers, ...) and actuators can be found in the literature that have been specifically designed for mimicking the communication principle in the brain: spikes. The problem when developing complex robots based on AER (or spikes) is to command actuators (motors) directly with spikes. Commercial robots are usually based on commercial standards (CAN) that do not allow powering actuators directly with spikes. This paper presents a co-design FPGA and embedded computer system that implements a bridge between these two protocols: CAN and AER. The bridge has been analyzed under the Spanish project VULCANO with an arm robot and a Shadow anthropomorphic hand. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.