Brain Machine Interfaces (BMI) that record signals from the motor cortex and translates these “thoughts” to action provides hope to paralyzed people. A high-accuracy decoder is needed for a seamless user experience. At the same time, it needs to be compact and low-power to support its integration in an implant to enable the compression required in wireless implantable BMIs. Hence, a model with a good trade-off between accuracy and resource requirement is desirable and was the subject of the 2024 Grand Challenge at BioCAS based on prerecorded datasets. However, in real-life, the usage of braincontrolled prosthetics, the result of decoding is presented to the user through visual feedback resulting in a closed-loop system. Hence, in the IEEE BioCAS 2025 conference, we organized the first grand challenge on Closed-Loop Neural Decoding (http://1.117.17.41/neural-decoding-grand-challenge/). The challenge requires users to move a cursor from a given start position to a target position based on spikes generated from a brain simulator. The evaluations were performed using the recently developed Neurobench software suite for benchmarking neuromorphic systems and the top 3 teams are invited to present their works in the IEEE BioCAS 2025. ... Read more

To give paralyzed people hope for a normal life, Brain Machine Interfaces (BMI) record signals from the motor cortex and a decoder translates these 'thoughts' to action. A high accuracy decoder is needed for a seamless user experience. At the same time it needs to be compact and low-power to support its integration in an implant to enable the compression required in wireless implantable BMIs. Hence, a model with a good trade-off between accuracy and resource requirement is desirable. In the IEEE BioCAS 2024 conference, we organized the first grand challenge on neural decoding for motor control. The evaluations were performed using the recently developed Neurobench software suite for benchmarking neuromorphic systems. There were two tracks -one preferring solutions with highest accuracy while the other gave weightage to the tradeoff between accuracy and implementation complexity. Out of the 10 teams registered for this event, the top 3 teams are invited to present their works in the IEEE BioCAS 2024. ... Read more

Machine learning (ML) has become a pervasive tool across computing systems. An emerging application that stress-tests the challenges of ML system design is tiny robot learning, the deployment of ML on resource-constrained low-cost autonomous robots. Tiny robot learning lies at the intersection of embedded systems, robotics, and ML, compounding the challenges of these domains. Tiny robot learning is subject to challenges from size, weight, area, and power (SWAP) constraints; sensor, actuator, and compute hardware limitations; end-to-end system tradeoffs; and a large diversity of possible deployment scenarios. Tiny robot learning requires ML models to be designed with these challenges in mind, providing a crucible that reveals the necessity of holistic ML system design and automated end-to-end design tools for agile development. This paper gives a brief survey of the tiny robot learning space, elaborates on key challenges, and proposes promising opportunities for future work in ML system design. ... Read more

We present fully autonomous source seeking onboard a highly constrained nano quadcopter, by contributing application-specific system and observation feature design to enable inference of a deep-RL policy onboard a nano quadcopter. Our deep-RL algorithm finds a high-performance solution to a challenging problem, even in presence of high noise levels and generalizes across real and simulation environments with different obstacle configurations. We verify our approach with simulation and in-field testing on a Bitcraze CrazyFlie using only the cheap and ubiquitous Cortex-M4 microcontroller unit. The results show that by end-to-end application-specific system design, our contribution consumes almost three times less additional power, as compared to a competitive learning-based navigation approach onboard a nano quadcopter. Thanks to our observation space, which we carefully design within the resource constraints, our solution achieves a 94% success rate in cluttered and randomized test environments, as compared to the previously achieved 80%. We also compare our strategy to a simple finite state machine (FSM), geared towards efficient exploration, and demonstrate that our policy is more robust and resilient at obstacle avoidance as well as up to 70% more efficient in source seeking. To this end, we contribute a cheap and lightweight end- to-end tiny robot learning (tinyRL) solution, running onboard a nano quadcopter, that proves to be robust and efficient in a challenging task. ... Read more

Nano quadcopters are ideal for gas source localization (GSL) as they are safe, agile and inexpensive. However, their extremely restricted sensors and computational resources make GSL a daunting challenge. We propose a novel bug algorithm named ‘Sniffy Bug', which allows a fully autonomous swarm of gas-seeking nano quadcopters to localize a gas source in unknown, cluttered, and GPS-denied environments. The computationally efficient, mapless algorithm foresees in the avoidance of obstacles and other swarm members, while pursuing desired waypoints. The waypoints are first set for exploration, and, when a single swarm member has sensed the gas, by a particle swarm optimization-based (PSO) procedure. We evolve all the parameters of the bug (and PSO) algorithm using our novel simulation pipeline, ‘AutoGDM'. It builds on and expands open source tools in order to enable fully automated end-to-end environment generation and gas dispersion modeling, allowing for learning in simulation. Flight tests show that Sniffy Bug with evolved parameters outperforms manually selected parameters in cluttered, real-world environments. Videos: https://bit.ly/37MmtdL ... Read more