Neuromorphic quadratic programming for efficient and scalable model predictive control

Applications in robotics or other size-, weight- and power-constrained autonomous systems at the edge often require real-time and low-energy solutions to large optimization problems. Event-based and memory-integrated neuromorphic architectures promise to solve such optimization problems with superior energy efficiency and performance compared to conventional von Neumann architectures. Here, we present a method to solve convex continuous optimization problems with quadratic cost functions and linear constraints on Intel's scalable neuromorphic research chip Loihi 2. When applied to model predictive control (MPC) problems for the quadruped robotic platform ANYmal, this method achieves over two orders of magnitude reduction in combined energy-delay product compared to the state-of-the-art solver, OSQP, on (edge) CPUs and GPUs with solution times under ten milliseconds for various problem sizes. These results demonstrate the benefit of non-von-Neumann architectures for robotic control applications.

A Long Short-Term Memory for AI Applications in Spike-based Neuromorphic Hardware

In spite of intensive efforts it has remained an open problem to what extent current Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods that employ Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) can be implemented more energy-efficiently on spike-based neuromorphic hardware. This holds in particular for AI methods that solve sequence processing tasks, a primary application target for spike-based neuromorphic hardware. One difficulty is that DNNs for such tasks typically employ Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) units. Yet an efficient emulation of these units in spike-based hardware has been missing. We present a biologically inspired solution that solves this problem. This solution enables us to implement a major class of DNNs for sequence processing tasks such as time series classification and question answering with substantial energy savings on neuromorphic hardware. In fact, the Relational Network for reasoning about relations between objects that we use for question answering is the first example of a large DNN that carries out a sequence processing task with substantial energy-saving on neuromorphic hardware.

Neuromorphic Nearest-Neighbor Search Using Intel's Pohoiki Springs

Neuromorphic computing applies insights from neuroscience to uncover innovations in computing technology. In the brain, billions of interconnected neurons perform rapid computations at extremely low energy levels by leveraging properties that are foreign to conventional computing systems, such as temporal spiking codes and finely parallelized processing units integrating both memory and computation. Here, we showcase the Pohoiki Springs neuromorphic system, a mesh of 768 interconnected Loihi chips that collectively implement 100 million spiking neurons in silicon. We demonstrate a scalable approximate k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) algorithm for searching large databases that exploits neuromorphic principles. Compared to state-of-the-art conventional CPU-based implementations, we achieve superior latency, index build time, and energy efficiency when evaluated on several standard datasets containing over 1 million high-dimensional patterns. Further, the system supports adding new data points to the indexed database online in O(1) time unlike all but brute force conventional k-NN implementations.