Realtime cerebellum: A large-scale spiking network model of the cerebellum that runs in realtime using a graphics processing unit

The cerebellum plays an essential role in adaptive motor control. Once we are able to build a cerebellar model that runs in realtime, which means that a computer simulation of 1 s in the simulated world completes within 1 s in the real world, the cerebellar model could be used as a realtime adaptive neural controller for physical hardware such as humanoid robots. In this paper, we introduce “Realtime Cerebellum (RC)”, a new implementation of our large-scale spiking network model of the cerebellum, which was originally built to study cerebellar mechanisms for simultaneous gain and timing control and acted as a general-purpose supervised learning machine of spatiotemporal information known as reservoir computing, on a graphics processing unit (GPU). Owing to the massive parallel computing capability of a GPU, RC runs in realtime, while reproducing qualitatively the same simulation results of the Pavlovian delay eyeblink conditioning with the previous version. RC is adopted as a realtime adaptive controller of a humanoid robot, which is instructed to learn a proper timing to swing a bat to hit a flying ball online. These results suggest that RC provides a means to apply the computational power of the cerebellum as a versatile supervised learning machine towards engineering applications.