Neuromorphic Adaptive Body Leveling in a Bioinspired Hexapod Walking Robot

In the past few decades, bioinspired hexapod walking robots have attracted increasing attention, mainly due to their potential to efficiently traverse rough terrains. Recently, neuromorphic (brain-inspired) robotic control has been shown to outperform conventional control paradigms in stochastic environments. In this work, we propose a neuromorphic adaptive body leveling algorithm for a hexapod walking robot during transversal over multi-leveled terrain. We demonstrate adaptive control with distributed accelerator-driven neuro-integrators with only a few thousand spiking neurons. We further propose a framework for the integration of MuJoCo, a modeling environment, and Nengo, a spiking neural networks compiler, for efficient evaluation of neuromorphic control over high degrees of freedom robotic systems in realistic physics-driven scenarios.