Entrainment of Silicon Central Pattern Generators for Legged Locomotory Control

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 16 (NIPS 2003)

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Authors

Francesco Tenore, Ralph Etienne-Cummings, M. Lewis

Abstract

We have constructed a second generation CPG chip capable of generating the necessary timing to control the leg of a walking machine. We demonstrate improvements over a previous chip by moving toward a significantly more versatile device. This includes a larger number of silicon neurons, more sophisticated neurons including voltage dependent charging and relative and absolute refractory periods, and enhanced programmability of neural networks. This chip builds on the basic results achieved on a previous chip and expands its versatility to get closer to a self-contained locomotion controller for walking robots. 1