A brain-inspired robot pain model based on a spiking neural network

INTRODUCTION: Pain is a crucial function for organisms. Building a “Robot Pain” model inspired by organisms' pain could help the robot learn self-preservation and extend longevity. Most previous studies about robots and pain focus on robots interacting with people by recognizing their pain expressions or scenes, or avoiding obstacles by recognizing dangerous objects. Robots do not have human-like pain capacity and cannot adaptively respond to danger. Inspired by the evolutionary mechanisms of pain emergence and the Free Energy Principle (FEP) in the brain, we summarize the neural mechanisms of pain and construct a Brain-inspired Robot Pain Spiking Neural Network (BRP-SNN) with spike-time-dependent-plasticity (STDP) learning rule and population coding method. METHODS: The proposed model can quantify machine injury by detecting the coupling relationship between multi-modality sensory information and generating “robot pain” as an internal state. RESULTS: We provide a comparative analysis with the results of neuroscience experiments, showing that our model has biological interpretability. We also successfully tested our model on two tasks with real robots—the alerting actual injury task and the preventing potential injury task. DISCUSSION: Our work has two major contributions: (1) It has positive implications for the integration of pain concepts into robotics in the intelligent robotics field. (2) Our summary of pain's neural mechanisms and the implemented computational simulations provide a new perspective to explore the nature of pain, which has significant value for future pain research in the cognitive neuroscience field.