报告题目:A Memristor-based Hybrid Analog-digital Computing Platform for Mobile Robotics

报告人：吴蔚教授（美国南加州大学）

报告时间：2023年7月3日上午10:00-11:00

报告地点：理学院师生活动中心

Abstract

Algorithms for mobile robotic systems are generally implemented on purely digital computing platforms. As complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) scaling approaches the end of the road, the improvement of the throughput of digital processors and computing power efficiency is nearing its end. This issue not only affects the power requirements of large data centers but also limits the performance of mobile robotic systems with perception and actuation. Developing alternative computational platforms may lead to more energy-efficient and responsive mobile robotics. Inspired by how human and animal brains work, we report a hybrid analog-digital computing platform enabled by memristors on a mobile inverted pendulum robot. The “cerebellum” (sensor fusion + motion control) of this mobile robotic system is implemented in memristor-based analog circuits, and the rest of the system is implemented in digital circuits. Such a platform can perform computation in the analog domain and thus removes the speed and energy efficiency bottleneck. Using a model-free optimization method, the mobile robotic system can tune the conductance states of memristors adaptively to achieve optimal control performance. The robot using the hybrid analog-digital platform demonstrated more than one order of magnitude enhancement of speed and energy efficiency over the traditional digital platform. A demo video (https://youtu.be/sJ26VmO4pB0) also shows that after an impact, the robot using our hybrid analog-digital platform recovers balance much faster than the same robot with the traditional digital platform. The technology can be used in more sophisticated robotic systems too. The implementation of this technology on micro air vehicles (MAV) will be presented too.

Biography

Dr. Wei Wu is an associate Professor at the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Southern California. He graduated from Peking University with a BS in Physics in 1996, and received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University in 2003. He joined USC in 2012. Before joining USC, he had worked as research associate, scientist and senior scientist at HP labs. He is an expert on nanofabrication and applications. His work includes nanoimprint lithography and applications in nano-electronics, nano-photonics, plasmonics, chemical sensing and nano-electrochemical cells. He coauthored 105 peer reviewed journal papers, 2 book chapters and more than 100 conference presentations, including 16 keynote and invited presentations. He has 115 issued U.S. patents. The nanoimprint machine that he invented has been successfully commercialized by EZImprinting Inc. He is the chair of Nanofabrication track, IEEE Nanotechnology Council. He is a co-editor of Applied Physics A and an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology. He was also an IEEE Nanotechnology Council 2015 and 2016 distinguished lecturer.