An Energy-Efficient Lane-Keeping System Using 3D LiDAR Based on Spiking Neural Network

Lane keeping, as a fundamental functionality of autonomous navigation, remains a challenging task for autonomous robots and vehicles. Recently, spiking neural networks (SNNs) have gained attention and research interest due to their biological plausibility and application potential on neuromorphic processors. SNNs have also been successfully deployed on robots to solve autonomous navigation problems. However, lane keeping with a LiDAR sensor is still an open problem for SNNs. In this work, we propose an end-to-end approach based on an SNN to solve the lane-keeping problem using a 3D LiDAR sensor. For the first time, we explore the capability of the proposed SNN controller to perceive the LiDAR input and exploit the features to perform reward-based feedback learning. To ensure the effectiveness of the controller, the proposed method is deployed and evaluated on two high-fidelity simulators. The experimental results demonstrate the high applicability and performance in different scenarios. Furthermore, experiments show that the SNN is capable of performing lane keeping in a simulated urban environment with only 18 control neurons and 32 synapse connections, producing on average only a 17cm deviation from lane center, which is 4.3 % of the lane width.