Spiking neural networks: Towards bio-inspired multimodal perception in robotics

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have captured apparent interest over the recent years, stemming from neuroscience and reaching the field of artificial intelligence. However, due to their nature SNNs remain far behind in achieving the exceptional performance of deep neural networks (DNNs). As a result, many scholars are exploring ways to enhance SNNs by using learning techniques from DNNs. While this approach has been proven to achieve considerable improvements in SNN performance, we propose another perspective: enhancing the biological plausibility of the models to leverage the advantages of SNNs fully. Our approach aims to propose a brain-like combination of audio-visual signal processing for recognition tasks, intended to succeed in more bio-plausible human-robot interaction applications.