Bat Echolocation: Neuromorphic VLSI Modeling and Robotics

Abstract

Bats have long been the envy of engineers, demonstrating fast, accurate sensing and agile flight control in complex 3D spaces, all in a tiny package. Their ability to fly rapidly through dark, cluttered forest environments in search of food far exceeds the capabilities of any existing man-made system. Current echolocation technology cannot meet the size, speed, and power constraints that this problem demands. Neuromorphic VLSI is a circuit design paradigm which seeks to capture the computational power, real-time performance, adaptability, and low power consumption typical of neural systems by mimicking the essential morphology and data representations found in the brain. Using these design techniques, our laboratory has been pursuing the development of echolocation circuits that mimic the neural processing in the big brown bat, Eptesicus fuscus. In this presentation, I will describe four activities in the laboratory: 1) VLSI modeling of the bat cochlea and physical models of the head that produce acoustic cues for sound localization, 2) neuromorphic VLSI modeling of the brainstem neural circuits that extract sound localization primitives, 3) development of neurally-plausible algorithms for transforming sonar data into movement strategies, and 4) recent experiments with live bats done in collaboration with Prof. Cynthia Moss at UMD. I will describe how these efforts fit together to address our goal of developing a neurobiologically-realistic robot that mimics the echolocation behavior of the big brown bat.

Biography

Dr. Timothy Horiuchi received both his Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering (1989) and his Ph.D. in Computation and Neural Systems (1997) from the California Institute of Technology. Following this, he did postdoctoral research at the Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Horiuchi joined the University of Maryland faculty as an Assistant Professor in 1999 as a part of the microelectronics group in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. He is a co-director of the Computational Sensorimotor Systems Laboratory and is a member of the Neurosciences and Cognitive Sciences Program at the University of Maryland. Dr. Horiuchi is one of the directors of the annual Telluride Neuromorphic Engineering Workshop and is involved in the growth of this international research community. He is also a member of the IEEE. Dr. Horiuchi has had diverse experience in industrial research, having served with many companies (Hughes Aircraft, Boeing, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Tanner Research) during his educational period. Dr. Horiuchi's general research interests are in computational neuroscience and the implementation of neural circuit architectures in VLSI-based processors. The applications of interest center around the coordination of complex sensory processing and control of motor systems. He has been involved in the development of analog VLSI chips that perform auditory and visual localization, implement non-volatile, on-chip analog memories, and control small mobile robotics. He is also involved in efforts to improve the tools and techniques used in neurophysiology. His current focus is the understanding of the bat echolocation system.

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