Live Demonstration: Event-driven Serial
Communication on Optical Fiber
Andrea De Marcellis4 , Guido Di Patrizio Stanchieri4 , Marco Faccio4 , Elia Palange4 ,
Paolo Motto Ros2 , Maurizio Martina3 , Danilo Demarchi3 , Chiara Bartolozzi1
Abstract—This demonstration presents the first implementa-
tion of “event-driven” serial asynchronous communication on
optical fiber. “event-driven” communication is used by neuro-
morphic sensors, that sample the sensory signal when the signal
itself changes of a given amount. This type of sensing adapts
to the dynamics of the input itself, achieving at the same time
extremely high temporal resolution (when needed), low latency
and signal compression. To apply this technology in robotics,
optical communication will greatly improve the resilience to
electric disturbances.
Robots are equipped with increasingly more sensors to
gather as much information from the external world as pos-
sible. Handling such a large quantity of data by optimizing
acquisition of information, robustness, and at the same time
bandwidth, power consumption and latency poses hard engi-
neering challenges. One possible solution is the use of event-
driven sensing [1], whereby the sensory signal is sampled only
when there is a variation of the signal itself, and sampling rate,
data transfer and processing depend on stimulus dynamics.
We developed an asynchronous serial protocol [2] to integrate
event-driven sensors on the iCub humanoid platform, including
tactile sensors [3] and accelerometers. This solution maintains
low-latency and high speed, while sensibly reducing the wiring
cost associated to the standard parallel implementation of the
Address Event Representation (AER) protocol [4]. In this
work, we aimed at improving electromagnetic compatibility
and signal integrity to reduce issues related to interferences
and disturbances – e.g. due to switching motors – as well
as to improve the data rate, BER and power consumption.
We developed a prototype system that transmits asynchronous
serial AER data over optical fiber. In this demo, we will
showcase a prototype implementation, as shown in Fig. 1,
comprising one skin patch, connected to a local board that
hosts an FPGA and an IMU1 . The FPGA acquires the ca-
pacitance values via I2C interface to an off-the-shelf analog
to digital converter and implements an event-driven encoding
of the acquired data, sending sequences of digital pulses.
The local board is then connected to a main acquisition
board (ZynQ XilinX FPGA) by optical fiber. The optical
communication platform is composed by a biasing circuit,
based on a current mirrors architecture, that converts voltage
pulses into current pulses. This controls and drives a Vertical
1 iCub Facility, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genova, Italy
2 Electronic Design Lab, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genova, Italy
3 Dipartimento di Elettronica, Politecnico di Torino, Torino, Italy
4 Università de L’Aquila, L’Aquila, Italy
1 Xilinx Artix XC7A50T FPGA; 9-axis absolute orientation sensor BNO055
Bosch
T
T
T H RH
Clock-driven Events Event-driven Event-driven
sensing generation optical processing
communication
Fig. 1. Demonstrator: pressure sensors are integrated on robot’s fingertips or
skin patches, each is interfaced to capacitance-to-digital converters (T) and
to a tactile hub (H), where the pressure value is converted in event-driven
encoding. AER voltage pulses are then converted into current pulses that
drive the optical fiber communication. The receiver (RH) converts back the
signal to voltage pulses that are then acquired in the main processing unit
(RH).
Cavity Surface Emitting Laser (VCSEL, OPV314AT by TT
Electronics) having an emitting power at λ= 850 nm and a re-
sponse time lower than 100 ps. The VCSEL is coupled to a 1 m
length fiber optic (multi-mode 50/125 μm, Duplex, FOPC-F2-
M5-DX-FCU-STU-010). Then, a high-speed Si-based fiber-
coupled photodiode (PD, DET025AFC/M by Thorlabs), with
rise/fall times of about 150 ps, detects the laser pulses so gener-
ating a pulsed photocurrent. Finally, the PD is interfaced with a
conditioning circuit, based on a transimpedance amplifier, that
converts current pulses into voltage pulses to be decoded by
the receiver. Visitors will interact with the tactile sensors and
accelerometers, while observing the output event stream on a
monitor in real time. Together with the raw stream of data,
quantitative performance indicators such as number of bits
transferred and errors in communications will be displayed.
R EFERENCES
[1] S.-C. Liu and T. Delbruck, “Neuromorphic sensory systems,” Current
Opinion in Neurobiology, vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 288–295, 2010.
[2] P. Motto Ros, M. Crepaldi, C. Bartolozzi, and D. Demarchi, “Asyn-
chronous DC-free serial protocol for event-based AER systems,” in 2015
IEEE International Conference on Electronics, Circuits, and Systems
(ICECS), Dec 2015, pp. 248–251.
[3] C. Bartolozzi, P. Motto Ros, F. Diotalevi, N. Jamali, and L. Natale,
“Event-driven encoding of off-the-shelf tactile sensors for compression
and latency optimisation for robotic skin,” in 2017 IEEE/RSJ Interna-
tional Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, Nov 2017.
[4] A. Mortara, “A pulsed communication/computation framework for ana-
log VLSI perceptive systems,” in Neuromorphic Systems Engineering,
T. Lande, Ed. Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic, 1998, pp. 217–228.