Target tracking control of a wheel-less snake robot based on a supervised multi-layered SNN

The snake-like robot without wheels is a bio-inspired robot whose high degree of freedom results in a challenge in autonomous locomotion control. The use of a Spiking Neural Network (SNN) which is a biologically plausible artificial neural network can help to achieve the autonomous locomotion behavior of snake robots in an energy-efficient manner. Approaches that use an SNN without hidden layers have been applied in the single-target tracking task. However, due to the complexity of the 3D gaits on a wheel-less snake robot and the imprecision of the pose control while in motion, they have some fluctuation that adversely affects their performances. In this work, we design two multi-layered SNNs with different topology for a wheel-less snake robot to track a certain moving object. The visual signals obtained from a Dynamic Vision Sensor (DVS) are fed into the SNN to drive the locomotion controller. Furthermore, the Reward-modulated Spike-Timing-Dependent Plasticity (R-STDP) learning rule is utilized to train the SNN end-to-end. Compared to the SNN without hidden layers, the proposed multi-layered SNN with a separated hidden layer shows its advantage in terms of robustness.