A New Robotics Platform for Neuromorphic Vision: Beobots

This paper is a technical description of a new mobile robotics platform specifically designed for the implementation and testing of neuromorphic vision algorithms in unconstrained outdoors environments. The platform is being developed by a team of undergraduate students with graduate supervision and help. Its distinctive features include significant computational power (four 1.1GHz CPUs with gigabit interconnect), high-speed four-wheel-drive chassis, standard Linux operating system, and a comprehensive toolkit of C++ vision classes. The robot is designed with two major goals in mind: real-time operation of sophisticated neuromorphic vision algorithms, and off-the-shelf components to ensure rapid technological evolvability. A preliminary embedded neuromorphic vision architecture that includes attentional, gist/layout, object recognition, and high-level decision subsystems is finally described.