Making Cortically-Inspired Sensorimotor Control Realistic for Robotics: Design of an Extended Parallel Cellular Programming Model

Abstract — This paper introduces a multi-layer software ar-chitecture, that allows smart design and implementation of complex cortical neural networks, and efficient parallel execution on multiprocessor machines. The developer implements cortical networks sticking to their natural fine grained formalism, without caring about its mapping on coarse grained parallel computers. The developer can use a set of graphical tools to easily develop and debug the cortical systems. Some experiments of new cortical model design on multipro-cessor PCs are introduced, and some performance measurements are given. This software suite is operational and currently in use in our laboratory to control a robotic arm through cortical neural networks running on multiprocessor PCs. I