Spiking Neuron Networks based Energy-Efficient Object Detection for Mobile Robot

Abstract

This paper focuses on the highly energy-efficient visual detection method, which first apples spiking neuron networks based object detection method in mobile robot. Visual perception is an important part of mobile robot, but the real-time visual perception is with high energy consumption that limits the battery running time of the robotic platform. In this paper, we bring in a Spiking-YOLO algorithm for the visual detection of the mobile robot, which combines the YOLO algorithm with the third generation artificial neural network-Spiking Neural Network (SNN). The Spiking-YOLO integrates the characteristics in real-time and high precision of the YOLO, and event-driven and low-powered nature of the SNN. We introduce the Spiking-YOLO model to the Robotnik's SUMMIT-XL mobile robot to perform the task of visual detection and the experimental verification is carried out on data sets. The experimental results show that this method has excellent energy-efficient and precision on the detection task of the robot.