A UDP Packet Format Establishing Adress Event Representation Communication Between Remote Neuromorphic and Biological Setups

TL;DR

This paper introduces a custom UDP packet format enabling remote communication between biohybrid systems and neuromorphic hardware over the internet, facilitating co-location challenges in brain-machine interface research.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel UDP packet format that supports reliable remote connection of biohybrids and neuromorphic systems over standard internet connections.

Findings

Packet jitter, delay, loss, and reordering are compatible with biohybrid processing.

The UDP format supports real-time communication in biohybrid experiments.

The approach has been successfully used in four EC-funded projects.

Abstract

In the field of brain-machine interfaces, biohybrids offer an interesting new perspective, as in them, the technological side acts like a closed-loop extension or real counterpart of biological tissue, instead of the usual open loop approaches in tranditional BMI. To achieve a credible counterpart to biological tissue, biohybrids usually employ one or several neuromorphic components as the hardware half of the biohybrid. However, advanced neuromorphic circuit such as memristor crossbars usually operate best in a dedicated lab with corresponding support equipment. The same is true for biological tissue, which makes co-locating all of the parts of a biohybrid in the same lab challenging. Here, we present as solution to this co-location issue a simple method to connect biohybrids via the internet by a custom UDP packet format. We show that the characteristics achieved with our solution (jitter, delay, packet loss, packet reordering) on a standard internet connection are compatible with various biohybrid processing paradigms, and we present a short three-ways experiment as proof-of-concept. The described UDP format has been employed to link biohybrids and neuromorphic circuits in four different EC-funded projects.