Toward autonomous event-based sensorimotor control with supervised gait learning and obstacle avoidance for robot navigation

Miniature robots are useful during disaster response and accessing remote or unsafe areas. They need to navigate uneven terrains without supervision and under severe resource constraints such as limited compute, storage and power budget. Event-based sensorimotor control in edge robotics has potential to enable fully autonomous and adaptive robot navigation systems capable of responding to environmental fluctuations by learning new types of motion and real-time decision making to avoid obstacles. This work presents a novel bio-inspired framework with a hierarchical control system to address these limitations, utilizing a tunable multi-layer neural network with a hardware-friendly Central Pattern Generator (CPG) as the core coordinator to govern the precise timing of periodic motion. Autonomous operation is managed by a Dynamic State Machine (DSM) at the top of the hierarchy, providing the necessary adaptability to handle environmental challenges such as obstacles or uneven terrain. The multi-layer neural network uses a nonlinear neuron model which employs mixed feedback at multiple timescales to produce rhythmic patterns of bursting events to control the motors. A comprehensive study of the architecture's building blocks is presented along with a detailed analysis of network equations. Finally, we demonstrate the proposed framework on the Petoi robot, which can autonomously learn walk and crawl gaits using supervised Spike-Time Dependent Plasticity (STDP) learning algorithm, transition between the learned gaits stored as new states, through the DSM for real-time obstacle avoidance. Measured results of the system performance are summarized and compared with other works to highlight our unique contributions.