A toolbox for neuromorphic sensing in robotics

The third generation of artificial intelligence (AI) introduced by neuromorphic computing is revolutionizing the way robots and autonomous systems can sense the world, process the information, and interact with their environment. The promises of high flexibility, energy efficiency, and robustness of neuromorphic systems is widely supported by software tools for simulating spiking neural networks, and hardware integration (neuromorphic processors). Yet, while efforts have been made on neuromorphic vision (event-based cameras), it is worth noting that most of the sensors available for robotics remain inherently incompatible with neuromorphic computing, where information is encoded into spikes. To facilitate the use of traditional sensors, we need to convert the output signals into streams of spikes, i.e., a series of events (+1, -1) along with their corresponding timestamps. In this paper, we propose a review of the coding algorithms from a robotics perspective and further supported by a benchmark to assess their performance. We also introduce a ROS (Robot Operating System) toolbox to encode and decode input signals coming from any type of sensor available on a robot. This initiative is meant to stimulate and facilitate robotic integration of neuromorphic AI, with the opportunity to adapt traditional off-the-shelf sensors to spiking neural nets within one of the most powerful robotic tools, ROS.