Neuromodulated Neural Hardware and Its Implementation on an Autonomous Mobile Robot

Abstract

In order to construct truly autonomous mobile robots, the concept of packaging is highly indispensable: all parts such as controllers, power systems, and batteries should be embedded inside a body. Therefore, implementing a controller on hardware is one of the most promising ways, since this contributes to low power consumption, miniaturization, and so on. Another crucial requirement in the field of autonomous mobile robots is robustness. That is, autonomous mobile robots have to cope with their unpredictably changing environments in real time. In this study, to meet these requirements the concept of Dynamically Rearrangeable Electrical Circuit(DREC) is proposed. In addition, we implement DREC onto FPGAs as physical electronic circuits by using the diffusion-reaction mechanism of neuromodulation which is widely observed in biological nervous systems. We developed the DREC for the peg-pushing task as a practical example. We confirmed that the physical DREC can successfully regulate the behavior according to the situation by changing its properties in real time.