A Spiking Sequence Generator for Polar Trajectories on Neuromorphic Hardware

Neuromorphic controllers for size, weight, and power-constrained systems require neural architectures that are both energy-efficient and interpretable at the level of system dynamics. However, existing approaches either rely on end-to-end trained spiking networks with limited interpretability, or on converted classical controllers that fail to fully exploit neuromorphic dynamics. We present a spiking neural network (SNN) architecture for generating polar trajectories, using a winner-take-all (WTA) architecture with accessory populations that induce controlled transitions in neural activity. We demonstrate tuning rules for these population dynamics, and utilize a form of shunting inhibition to enable independent control of direction, speed, and radius of the resulting polar trajectories. We implement the network on the SpiNNaker2 neuromorphic processor, and demonstrate a two to three orders of magnitude reduction in wall-clock step time and three to four orders of magnitude reduction in energy expenditure when compared to conventional computing platforms.