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A paper presentation on

NEUROMORPHIC VLSI DESIGN USING BAT

ECHOLOCATION

PRESENTED BY:
SK.SARDAR BHASA
IIIrd YEAR , ECE
VIKAS COLLEGE OF ENGG AND TECH
NUNNA
VIJAYAWADA. .

MAILID: sardarbashashaik05@gmail.com

B.BABU REDDY
IIIrd YEAR , ECE
VIKAS COLLEGE OF ENGG AND TECH
NUNNA
VIJAYAWADA.
MAIL ID: bogireddy150c@gmail.com
1. ABSTRACT:

Birds and bats have long been the envy of engineers, demonstrating fast, accurate
sensing and agile flight control in complex, confined 3D spaces, all in a tiny
package. Their ability to fly rapidly through cluttered forest environments in
search of food far exceeds the capabilities of any existing man-made system. The
technology that is developing and propose to bring to this application domain is
neuromorphic VLSI. For more than a decade, a growing number of VLSI
researchers worldwide have been developing a common toolbox of hybrid analog
and digital VLSI techniques to mimic the signal processing of neural systems.
This effort has spawned many projects in smart vision sensors and systems:
silicon cochleae, retinal and cochlear prosthetics, neural prosthetics, biologically
realistic legged robotics, on-chip learning systems and many more.

Using these design techniques, our laboratory recently has pursued the
development of echolocation circuits that mimic the neural processing in the big
brown bat, Eptesicus fuscus. One population of neurons that we have designed is
ons that we have designed is tuned to detect the angle of echo arrival as
determined by the relative loudness at two microphones placed on a model bat
head. These biological algorithms are implemented in commercially available
CMOS fabrication processes (e.g., the MOSIS service) and operate in real-time
with power consumption in the range of milli watts.
2.INTRODUCTION:

From a computational neuroscience perspective, bats are remarkable because of

the very short timescale on which they operate. The barrage of returning sonar
echoes from a bat's near-environment lasts approximately 30 milliseconds
following a sonar emission with the echo from a specific target lasting, at most, a
few milliseconds. At this timescale, a particular neuron has the opportunity to fire
only one or two spikes to represent the echo. Unlike the “traditional” view of
cortical processing where many spikes are integrated over time to compute an
average rate, the bat must rely on populations of neurons that respond transiently
but selectively to different objects in the environment. In these neural circuits, the
details of spike timing, synaptic dynamics, and neuron biophysics become
extremely important. Flying at speeds anywhere from 1m/s to 6 m/s, a bat’s
sensory world jumps from pulse to pulse as it flies through the world. Sensory
prediction is therefore likely to be very important in this animal. In spite of all
this behavioral specialization, the bat brain is organized like most other
mammalian brains suggesting that echolocation arises from only small
modifications of the typical mammalian auditory system.
3.GOAL:

Our goal is to construct a flying bat-sized creature that uses ultrasonic

echolocation to both navigate and scrutinize its environment sufficiently to
distinguish between obstacles and "insects". The bat's sensory and motor system
will be constructed from neural models and implemented using "neuromorphic"
VLSI techniques. Our intention is two-fold: 1) to test these neural algorithms in
a real-time, closed-loop behavioral situation, and 2) to develop useful sonar
sensors for use in miniature aircraft systems.
BAT HEAD:
We are working with two different hardware systems: a physically larger
single-frequency sonar system ("narrowband") and a tiny broadband system. The
narrowband system is being used to rapidly test concepts following initial
software tests. Photos of these two systems are found below:

In the photo to the left is our narrowband sonar system that

operates only on a frequency of 40 kHz. The fixed arrangement of the
microphones was chosen to produce a difference in echo amplitude with
azimuthal direction. The current system roughly extracts direction and range and
is capable of servoing the head (which is mounted on an model airplane servo) to
track moving targets in real-time.

On the right, we have a photo of our broadband system using a baked polymer
clay bat head with a tiny Knowles (FG3329) microphone soldered to the end of a
group of wires. This system has two broadband ultrasonic (and audio)
microphones that will feed our silicon cochleae chips.

Both of these physical heads produce intensity difference cues at each

microphone that allows the system to determine the angle of the arriving echo.

4.AN ULTRASONIC COCHLEA:

Echo locating bats specialize in high-frequency hearing using

echolocation sounds that typically range in frequency from 20 kHz to 100 kHz.
While some bats are specialized for specific frequencies with cochlear filtering at
extremely high Q10dB values, we are studying bats that use a broadband
vocalization and are ultrasonic frequency generalists (e.g., Myotis lucifugus) with
Q10dB values in the range of 10 to 30. Good frequency resolution is important
for vertical localization, discriminating close objects as well as for prey
determination.
To support our ongoing work in modeling bat echolocation, a binaural,
ultrasonic cochlea-like filter bank has been designed with moderate quality (Q)
factor (as high as 65) with spiking neurons that are driven by the filter outputs.
The neuron addresses are reported off chip at the time of the spike in an un-
arbitrated fashion and in current-mode to reduce the amount of capacitively-
coupled feedback into the filters. This chip was fabricated in a commercially- .5
um CMOS process and consumes 0.425 milli watts at 5 volts.
 When echoes arrive from different directions, the number of spikes generated
in the auditory nerve and the cochlear nucleus varies with the intensity at each
ear. Using this information, the first binaural nucleus in the mammalian auditory
system, the lateral superior olive (or LSO) becomes selective to the direction of
arrival. These cells are excited by the intensity from one ear and inhibited by the
intensity from the other ear.

The binaural LSO response and the monaural response from the
cochlear nucleus are projected to the inferior colliculus (IC) via the doral nucleus of the
lateral lemniscus (or DNLL), resulting in very similar responses in both DNLL and IC.
With similar responses in the LSO as in the IC, one can ask the question, "What kind of
computation is going on here?" In the figure above is a set of tuning curves for three
LSO cells that have different synaptic weightings from the left and right ears. By
comparing the responses of the population of LSO cells, each of which have different
synaptic weightings, we can determine which direction an echo is arriving from.
5.DELAY TUNED CELLS (RANGE TUNING):

Information about target range has many uses for bats during both prey-capture
and navigation tasks. Beyond the extraction of distance and velocity, it may be
important for less obvious tasks, such as optimizing the parameters of the
echolocation process. For example, as a bat approaches a target, it alters the
repetition rate, duration, spectral content, and amplitude of it vocalizations. Not
only is echolocation used for insect capture, it provides to the bat information
about obstacles, roosts, altitude, and other flying creatures.

In the bat’s brainstem and midbrain exist neural circuits that are sensitive to
the specific difference in time between the outgoing sonar vocalization and the
returning echo. While some of the details of the neural mechanisms are known to
be species-specific, a basic model of reference-triggered, post-inhibitory rebound
timing is reasonably well supported by available data.

Neurons have been found in bats that show a ‘facilitated’ response to paired sounds (a
simulated vocalization and an echo) presented at particular delays. The cells’ responses
to sounds presented at the appropriate delays are much greater than the sum of the
responses to the individual sounds presented alone. These cells are part of a
larger class of neurons called ‘combination-sensitive’ neurons, and are
specifically referred to as delay-tuned cells. Delay-tuned cells are found at many
levels in the bat auditory system. They have been found in the inferior colliculus
(IC), the medial geniculate body (MGB), and the auditory cortex. Disruption of
cortical delay-tuned cells has been shown to impair a bat’s ability to discriminate
artificial pulse-echo pair delays. It is likely that delay- tuned neurons play a role
in forming the bat’s perception of range, although delay-tuned cells have also
been shown to respond to the social calls of other bats.

6.COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS:
There are many obvious commercial and industrial applications of integrated
sensory systems implemented in low-power VLSI. The development of a small,
sophisticated, power-efficient, low-cost echolocation system has many potential
applications beyond neural modeling. In the biomedical realm, such devices are
beginning to be used as another option for collision avoidance and spatial sensing
for blind or low vision patients. These devices when properly scaled down could
also be used to guide endoscopic instruments or provide additional information
about distance to monocular, visually guided surgical tools. Air-coupled sonar, las
a basic sensor module for; mobile robotics, has not advanced significantly beyond
a narrow-beam, closest-target sensor, despite decades of use, with robotic vacuum
cleaners finally hitting the market, a low power module with significantly more
sensing capability at low cost could facilitate a new range of commercial products
and toys that have the ability to sense objects in the near-field like a full set of
whiskers.
From a micro- aerial vehicle (MAV) perspective, while GPS have successfully
enabled long-range navigation, the final leg of many desirable machines occurs in
locations where the lack of GPS signals and unmapped obstacles make
Navigation untenable; such locations include inside building, under the forest
canopy, in canyons, and in caves. Obtaining the range to objects directly, while
computing azimuth, sonar systems are a natural complement to vision systems for
these challenging environments. When combined with an ornithopter airframe, a
nearly silent device (to humans), the ability to fly in darkness seems to be within
reach.
7.CONCLUSION:

Overall this paper proves to be wonderful framework of in which to pursue

different types of scientific engineering-oriented research and education.
Understanding bat echolocation involves many interesting problems of signal
processing within the context of biological data representations and neural
hardware.

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