Aquila: An open-source GPU-accelerated toolkit for cognitive and neuro-robotics research

This paper presents a novel open-source software application, Aquila, developed as a part of the ITALK and RobotDoC projects. The software provides many different tools and biologically-inspired models, useful for cognitive and developmental robotics research. Aquila addresses the need for high-performance robot control by adopting the latest parallel processing paradigm, based on the NVidia CUDA technology. The software philosophy, implementation, functionalities and performance are described together with three practical examples of selected modules.