An Energy Efficient System for Touch Modality Classification in Electronic Skin Applications

Electronic-skin aiming to mimic human skin is becoming a reality and systems able to process data close to the sensors are required to reduce latency and power consumption. This paper presents the design and implementation of an energy efficient smart system for tactile sensing based on a RISC-V parallel ultra-low power platform (PULP). The PULP processor, called Mr. Wolf, performs the on-board classification of different touch modalities. This demonstrates the promising use of on-board classification for emerging robot and prosthetic applications. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the platform on improving the energy efficiency of the online classification. In our experiments, Mr. Wolf runs 3.6 times faster than an ARM Cortex M4F (STM32F40), consuming only 28 mW. The proposed platform achieves 15x better energy efficiency, than the classification done on the STM32F40, consuming only 81mJ per classification.