Breaking the Sensorimotor Loop - A Memristor-Ready Robot Control Architecture

Abstract

Traditional sensorimotor loops are causal, i.e., the underlying control algorithm exhibits separate input and output lines, where the output fully depends on the input and an internal state of the algorithm itself. This is both true for digital and analog implementations. In the paper at hand we propose an acausal cellular analog architecture for robot control which offers advantages when memristors are to be incorporated for behavior switching and adaptation. Even for complex behavior, e.g., a robot standing-up, the architecture can stay simple since no cross-connections between the different joints' motor control units are needed.