Disclosure of a Neuromorphic Starter Kit

Abstract

This paper presents a Neuromorphic Starter Kit, which has been designed to help a variety of research groups perform research, exploration and real-world demonstrations of brain-based, neuromorphic processors and hardware environments. A prototype kit has been built and tested. We explain the motivation behind the kit, its design and composition, and a prototype physical demonstration.

Mortal Computation: A Foundation for Biomimetic Intelligence

“…In the domain of (neuro)robotics [79], viable tools have emerged over the past years [115,366,226], offering improved physics engines for simulating real-world robotic systems and some of the task environments in which they would operate. With respect to neuromorphic substrates, simulators of neuromorphic chips [196,217] and emulator kits, e.g., the RISP neuro-processor [282,281,130], have recently emerged; offering an alternative to expensive, non-mainstream hardware. However, while digital emulation might prove to be an invaluable solution, even serving as a force behind the rapid prototyping of early mortal computers, there is always a prescient gap between the fidelity and realism of a particular simulation and the real-world niche that it attempts to emulate, i.e., the "sim2real" problem [173].…”