Neuromorphic Quadratic Programming for Efficient and Scalable Model Predictive Control: Towards Advancing Speed and Energy Efficiency in Robotic Control

摘要

Applications in robotics or other size-, weight-, and power-constrained (SWaP) autonomous systems at the edge often require real-time and low-energy solutions to large optimization problems. Event-based and memory-integrated neuromorphic architectures promise to solve such optimization problems with superior energy efficiency and performance compared to conventional von Neumann architectures. Here, we present a method to solve convex continuous optimization problems with quadratic cost functions and linear constraints on Intel’s scalable neuromorphic research chip Loihi 2. When applied to model predictive control (MPC) problems for the quadruped robotic platform ANYmal, this method achieves more than two orders of magnitude reduction in the combined energy-delay product (EDP) compared to the state-of-the-art solver, OSQP, on (edge) CPUs and GPUs with solution times under 10 ms for various problem sizes. These results demonstrate the benefit of non-von Neumann architectures for robotic control applications.