EECS Assistant Professor Catherine Schuman was a featured speaker at last week’s Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in Orlando, Florida. Schuman’s talk was entitled “Neuro for Speed: Autonomous Racing with Brain-Inspired Hardware.” She related how she and her group of collaborators, which includes both high school student mentees and researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, used neuromorphic computing to control a small, autonomous model race car.

Schuman introduced neuromorphic computing to her audience, explained how she and her collaborators trained neural networks for their neuromorphic computer using evolutionary algorithms, and shared demonstration videos of the neuromorphic computer driving the group’s small-scale race car. Her talk also covered the challenge of power consumption of computing on autonomous vehicles as neuromorphic computers offer the opportunity for extremely low-power intelligent computation.