Ultra-low power chips help make small robots more capable

To conserve power, the chips use a hybrid digital-analog time-domain processor in which the pulse-width of signals encodes information. Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology demonstrated robotic cars driven by the unique ASICs at the 2019 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). The research was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) through the Center for Brain-inspired Computing Enabling Autonomous Intelligence (CBRIC). "We are trying to bring intelligence to these very small robots so they can learn about their environment and move around autonomously, without infrastructure," said Arijit Raychowdhury, associate professor in Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. "To accomplish that, we want to bring low-power circuit concepts to these very small devices so they can make decisions on their own. There is a huge demand for very small, but capable robots that do not require infrastructure."