Spatio-temporal spike pattern classification in neuromorphic systems

Spike-based neuromorphic electronic architectures offer an attractive solution for implementing compact efficient sensory-motor neural processing systems for robotic applications. Such systems typically comprise event-based sensors and multi-neuron chips that encode, transmit, and process signals using spikes. For robotic applications, the ability to sustain real-time interactions with the environment is an essential requirement. So these neuromorphic systems need to process sensory signals continuously and instantaneously, as the input data arrives, classify the spatio-temporal information contained in the data, and produce appropriate motor outputs in real-time. In this paper we evaluate the computational approaches that have been proposed for classifying spatio-temporal sequences of spike-trains, derive the main principles and the key components that are required to build a neuromorphic system that works in robotic application scenarios, with the constraints imposed by the biologically realistic hardware implementation, and present possible system-level solutions.