An event-based motor controller design is presented.
The system is designed to solve the classic inverted
pendulum problem by using a robotic platform and a totally
neuro-inspired event-based mechanism. Specifically, DVS retinas
provide feedback and an FPGA implements control. The robotic
platform used is the so called ’pencil balancer’. The retinas
provide visual information to the FPGA that processes it and
obtains the center of mass of the pencil. Once this center of
mass is averaged over time, it is used joint with the cart position
provided by a flat potentiometer bar to compute the angle of
the pencil from the vertical. The angle is delivered to an eventbased
Proportional-Derivative (PD) controller that drives the DC
motor using Pulse Frequency Modulation (PFM) to accomplish
the control objective. The results show an accurate, real-time and
efficient controller design
