Hardware implementation of photonic neuromorphic autonomous navigation

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel photonic neuromorphic reinforcement learning system for autonomous navigation, achieving low latency and energy efficiency through integrated photonic hardware and experimental validation.

Contribution

It introduces a hybrid photonic RL architecture with a DFB-SA laser array for the Actor network, demonstrating practical autonomous navigation with low power and latency.

Findings

Achieved 80% success rate in navigation tasks

Energy consumption of 0.78 nJ per inference

Latency of 191.20 ps per inference

Abstract

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a core technology enabling the transition of artificial intelligence (AI) from perception to decision-making, but its deployment on conventional electronic hardware suffers from high latency and energy consumption imposed by the von Neumann architecture. Here, we propose a photonic spiking twin delayed deep deterministic policy gradient (TD3) reinforcement learning architecture for neuromorphic autonomous navigation and experimentally validate it on a distributed feedback laser with a saturable absorber (DFB-SA) array. The hybrid architecture integrates a photonic spiking Actor network with dual continuous-valued Critic networks, where the final nonlinear spiking activation layer of the Actor is deployed on the DFB-SA laser array. In autonomous navigation tasks, the system achieves an average reward of 58.22 plus-minus 17.29 and a success rate of 80% plus-minus 8.3%. Hardware-software co-inference demonstrates an estimated energy consumption of 0.78 nJ/inf and an ultra-low latency of 191.20 ps/inf, with co-inference error rates of 0.051% and 0.059% in task scenarios with and without obstacle interference, respectively. Simulations for error-activated channels show full agreement with the expected responses, validating the dynamic characteristics of the DFB-SA laser. The architecture shows strong potential for integration with large-scale photonic linear computing chips, enabling fully-functional photonic computation and low-power, low-latency neuromorphic autonomous navigation.