The need for neuromorphic computing in industrial robotics

With Moore’s law coming to its limits, the rate of increase in compute power available for processing applications is similarly coming to a halt. This implies that the compute intensive tasks, such as robotics, artificial intelligence, and high-performance space computing need innovative ways to cater their ever-increasing compute needs. One innovative way to solve computational bottlenecks is to bring compute and memory together, as opposed to the Von Neumann computational model, with greater degree of parallelism in an event-based, asynchronous computation paradigm. Neuromorphic computing is one such paradigm that draws its inspiration from the brain. Energy and computational efficiency, asynchronous and event-based processing being its salient features, neuromorphic computing is an area worth exploring for compute intensive tasks. In this paper, the authors explore the possibilities and benefits of neuromorphic computing in robotics, and establish possible research directions that could benefit the robotics domain.