APRON is a simulation tool that has been in development for two and a half years, and provides flexible, high-speed simulation of array based computations. For example Image Processing and Topographic Neural Networks. The APRON architecture allows custom extensions to the simulator for the addition of in-house functionality. I've been using APRON as an interface to FPGAs, GPUs, Robot Arms, Vision Sensors and Pan & Tilt units. The high-speed simulation allows the integration of many components in "interactive-time", allowing for the development of robotic applications. This website provides all the documentation, binaries and tutorials for the APRON software. APRON is award winning (!) winning the "Best Student Paper" award at the Cellular Neural Networks and their Applications (CNNA) Workshop 2008, in Santiago De Compostella.

D-NET is an easy to use (and retrofit) client-server system, which handles some of the complexities usually associated with those systems for you. It's indended purpose was the quick and simple facilitation of data-transfer amongst co-operating tools and components, without the need to heavily integrate it into your application. All transfer between the "D-Clients" is socket based and is controlled by a "D-Server". Clients can simply connect and communicate as long as they know the IP address of the Server. There is no specified data format to adhere to, as it is expected that the clients will have agreed this in advance. At the recent Cognitive Neuromorphic Engineering (CNE) Workshop in Capo Caccia 2009, D-NET was succesfully used to enable co-simulation between the APRON and BioNICS simulation tools.

[PDF] D.R.W.Barr and P.Dudek, "APRON: A Cellular Processor Array Simulation and Hardware Design Tool", EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing, vol. 2009

[PDF] D.R.W.Barr and P.Dudek, "A Cellular Processor Array Simulation and Hardware Prototyping Tool", IEEE Workshop on Cellular Neural Networks and their Applications, CNNA 2008, pp.213-218, July 2008 (Best Paper Award)

[PDF] D.R.W.Barr and P.Dudek, "Demonstration of the APRON Processor Array Simulation Software",  IEEE Workshop on Cellular Neural Networks and their Applications, CNNA 2008, pp.2-2, July 2008

[PDF] M.Huelse, D.R.W.Barr and P.Dudek, "Cellular Automata and Non-static Image Processing for Embodied Robot Systems on a Massively Parallel Processor Array", Automata-2008, Theory and Applications of Cellular Automata, pp.504-513, Luniver Press, 2008.

[PDF] D.R.W.Barr, P.Dudek, J.Chambers and K.Gurney, “Implementation of Multi-layer Leaky Integrator Networks on a Cellular Processor Array”, International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, IJCNN 2007, Orlando, Florida, August 2007

[PDF] D.R.W.Barr, S.J.Carey, A.Lopich and P.Dudek, “A Control System for a Cellular Processor Array”, IEEE International Workshop on Cellular Neural Networks and their Applications, CNNA 2006, pp.176-181, Istanbul, August 2006

[PDF] P.Dudek, D.R.W.Barr, A.Lopich and S.J. Carey, “Demonstration of real-time image processing on the SCAMP-3 vision system”, IEEE International Workshop on Cellular Neural Networks and their Applications, CNNA 2006, pp.13-13, Istanbul, August 2006

[IMAGE] “Implementation of Multi-layer Leaky Integrator Networks on a Cellular Processor Array”, IJCNN 2007, Orlando

[IMAGE] “Biologically Plausible Topographic Network Simulation on Fine-Grained Processing Systems", Manchester SE&EE, 2008

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