Resource-efficient bio-inspired visual processing on the hexapod walking robot HECTOR

PLoS One. 2020 Apr 1;15(4):e0230620. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0230620. eCollection 2020.

Abstract

Emulating the highly resource-efficient processing of visual motion information in the brain of flying insects, a bio-inspired controller for collision avoidance and navigation was implemented on a novel, integrated System-on-Chip-based hardware module. The hardware module is used to control visually-guided navigation behavior of the stick insect-like hexapod robot HECTOR. By leveraging highly parallelized bio-inspired algorithms to extract nearness information from visual motion in dynamically reconfigurable logic, HECTOR is able to navigate to predefined goal positions without colliding with obstacles. The system drastically outperforms CPU- and graphics card-based implementations in terms of speed and resource efficiency, making it suitable to be also placed on fast moving robots, such as flying drones.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted
  • Models, Biological
  • Motion Perception
  • Robotics*
  • Vision, Ocular
  • Walking

Grants and funding

This work has been supported by the DFG Center of Excellence Cognitive Interaction Technology (CITEC, EXC 277) within the EICCI-project as well as by the Open Access Publication Fund of Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation).