Some brief introduction about  the project ‘Brains on Board: Neuromorphic Control of Flying Robots’  

What if we could design an autonomous flying robot with the navigational and learning abilities of a honeybee? Such a computationally and energy-efficient autonomous robot would represent a step-change in robotics technology, and is precisely what the ‘Brains on Board’ project aims to achieve. Autonomous control of mobile robots requires robustness to environmental and sensory uncertainty, and the flexibility to deal with novel environments and scenarios. Animals solve these problems through having flexible brains capable of unsupervised pattern detection and learning. Even ‘small’-brained animals like bees exhibit sophisticated learning and navigation abilities using very efficient brains of only up to 1 million neurons, 100,000 times fewer than in a human brain. Crucially, these mini-brains nevertheless support high levels of multi-tasking and they are adaptable, within the lifetime of an individual, to completely novel scenarios; this is in marked contrast to typical control engineering solutions. This project will fuse computational and experimental neuroscience to develop a ground-breaking new class of highly efficient ‘brain on board’ robot controllers, able to exhibit adaptive behaviour while running on powerful yet lightweight General-Purpose Graphics Processing Unit hardware, now emerging for the mobile devices market. This will be demonstrated via autonomous and adaptive control of a flying robot, using an on-board computational simulation of the bee’s neural circuits; an unprecedented achievement representing a step-change in robotics technology.

The research objectives of the project are to:

• Use the honeybees’ mini brain to advance our understanding of the computational bases of navigation and action selection.
• Reproduce these behaviours in minimal neural models running on computational hardware in virtual environments.
• Develop neural modelling and hardware tools and techniques to a level at which real-time large-scale neural simulation on low-power, low-weight, high-throughput processor technology is feasible.
• Develop flying robot platforms that replicate the sensory capabilities and flight dynamics of the honeybee to a high level of fidelity.
• Deploy results from objectives 1 to 4 to develop and test on-board autonomous real-time controllers for flying robots.

For further info, please visit the project website Brains on Board. 

References:

Brains on Board Project. http://brainsonboard.co.uk/ 

Brains on Board: Neuromorphic Control of Flying Robots. http://gow.epsrc.ac.uk/NGBOViewGrant.aspx?GrantRef=EP/P006094/1