Mem-adaptive computing – Part II: circuit design

The standard Go-Against-the-Force strategy to lift a limb of a humanoid robot from the stable rest state to the upright position and to maintain it there afterwards is slow and consumes a significant amount of energy due to the iterative cycle of sensing and driving operations its application consists of. In order to enhance the performance of the control action, the Part I paper introduced the theory behind an innovative three-phase strategy, called Kick-Fly-Catch paradigm, which is expected to lead to a faster limb motion under a lower energy cost as compared to the original approach. The combined ability of a non-volatile memristor to process data according to Ohm's law, store computation results at power off, and adapt its dynamic behaviour on the basis of its state equation is at the origin for the performance benefits of the proposed strategy over the standard approach. This Part II paper designs a circuit implementation for the overall dynamic system under the new control strategy, and validates the theoretic predictions of the Part I manuscript.