Benchmarking the Energy Cost of Assurance in Neuromorphic Edge Robotics

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Kaczmarek, Sylvester
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911515454472192
author Kaczmarek, Sylvester
author_facet Kaczmarek, Sylvester
contents Deploying trustworthy artificial intelligence on edge robotics imposes a difficult trade-off between high-assurance robustness and energy sustainability. Traditional defense mechanisms against adversarial attacks typically incur significant computational overhead, threatening the viability of power-constrained platforms in environments such as cislunar space. This paper quantifies the energy cost of assurance in event-driven neuromorphic systems. We benchmark the Hierarchical Temporal Defense (HTD) framework on the BrainChip Akida AKD1000 processor against a suite of adversarial temporal attacks. We demonstrate that unlike traditional deep learning defenses which often degrade efficiency significantly with increased robustness, the event-driven nature of the proposed architecture achieves a superior trade-off. The system reduces gradient-based adversarial success rates from 82.1% to 18.7% and temporal jitter success rates from 75.8% to 25.1%, while maintaining an energy consumption of approximately 45 microjoules per inference. We report a counter-intuitive reduction in dynamic power consumption in the fully defended configuration, attributed to volatility-gated plasticity mechanisms that induce higher network sparsity. These results provide empirical evidence that neuromorphic sparsity enables sustainable and high-assurance edge autonomy.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_13880
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Benchmarking the Energy Cost of Assurance in Neuromorphic Edge Robotics
Kaczmarek, Sylvester
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Hardware Architecture
Machine Learning
Robotics
Deploying trustworthy artificial intelligence on edge robotics imposes a difficult trade-off between high-assurance robustness and energy sustainability. Traditional defense mechanisms against adversarial attacks typically incur significant computational overhead, threatening the viability of power-constrained platforms in environments such as cislunar space. This paper quantifies the energy cost of assurance in event-driven neuromorphic systems. We benchmark the Hierarchical Temporal Defense (HTD) framework on the BrainChip Akida AKD1000 processor against a suite of adversarial temporal attacks. We demonstrate that unlike traditional deep learning defenses which often degrade efficiency significantly with increased robustness, the event-driven nature of the proposed architecture achieves a superior trade-off. The system reduces gradient-based adversarial success rates from 82.1% to 18.7% and temporal jitter success rates from 75.8% to 25.1%, while maintaining an energy consumption of approximately 45 microjoules per inference. We report a counter-intuitive reduction in dynamic power consumption in the fully defended configuration, attributed to volatility-gated plasticity mechanisms that induce higher network sparsity. These results provide empirical evidence that neuromorphic sparsity enables sustainable and high-assurance edge autonomy.
title Benchmarking the Energy Cost of Assurance in Neuromorphic Edge Robotics
topic Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Hardware Architecture
Machine Learning
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.13880