Competence Acquisition in an Autonomous Mobile Robot using Hardware Neural Techniques

Abstract

In this paper we examine the practical use of hardware neural networks in an autonomous mobile robot. We have developed a hardware neural system based around a custom VLSI chip, EP-SILON III, designed specifically for embedded hardware neural applications. We present here a demonstration application of an autonomous mobile robot that highlights the flexibility of this sys-tem. This robot gains basic mobility competence in very few train-ing epochs using an "instinct-rule " training methodology. 1