ONN-Based On-chip Learning for Obstacle Avoidance on Mobile Robot

International audience ; The amount of data available to process at the edge has increased drastically in the last decades with the emergence of edge devices in numerous domains. Moreover, the increasing amount of data requires powerful artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, such as deep learning algorithms to process the data, and they are very power-hungry. Thus, there is a lot of ongoing research on how to train and compute on edge devices. Current hardware architectures based on von Neumann are not adapted for AI algorithms due to the processing to memory transfer bottleneck [1]. Recently, neuromorphic computing, which proposes brain-inspired hardware-based paradigms, has emerged as a suitable solution to edge computing, removing the von Neumann bottleneck [1].Oscillatory Neural Network (ONN) is a promising neuromorphic computing paradigm for AI at the edge. ONNs [2,3,4] are networks of coupled oscillators using the natural synchronization behavior of oscillators to compute. Information is encoded in the phase relationship among oscillators to reduce the voltage amplitude and limit power consumption [5]. In state-of-the-art, ONN is configured with a fully- connected recurrent architecture, and trained with unsupervised learning to solve auto-associative memory tasks, like pattern recognition. In the framework of the EU H2020 NEURONN [6] project, we explore ONN architectures, learning algorithms, and applications to showcase ONN advantages for edge computing. We developed a fully-connected recurrent ONN in digital to implement it on FPGA to explore ONN edge applications and on-chip learning capabilities [7]. For example, using the ONN auto- associative memory properties, we demonstrated it can efficiently solve real-time obstacle avoidance application on mobile robots equipped with proximity sensors [8,9]. In this case, we cascade two ONNs, one trained to detect obstacles and the second trained to define the novel robot direction. Later, we updated the system with an all-in-one architecture based on a ...