Digital Hardware Implementation of a Biological Central Pattern Generator

摘要

Central Pattern Generator (CPG) plays a key role in controlling the locomotion part of the animals. Bio-inspired CPGs can be employed in many robotic and control applications. A digital hardware implementation of a central pattern generator based on Hindmarsh-Rose (HR) neuron model is presented in this paper. Aiming an efficient implementation, the neuron module is implemented using multiplier-less Piecewise Linear (PWL) method. The CPG network is built by coupling HR neuron modules to produce the anti-phase patterns in the output of the network. The system has been developed by Hardware Description Language (HDL) and synthesized based on an Altera FPGA. Synthesis results for a block of CPG indicate that it takes less than 1% of the resources of a Stratix IV Altera FPGA for the proposed system. The results have been compared for the proposed digital hardware and the original CPG implementation. Also, hardware implementation results verify that the system is successfully able to reproduce the original CPG patterns.