Benchmarking the Energy Cost of Assurance in Neuromorphic Edge 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.

Key Contributions

• First energy-efficiency benchmark of adversarial defenses on commercial neuromorphic hardware (BrainChip Akida AKD1000)
• Demonstrates that neuromorphic defenses can improve robustness without energy penalty — defended configuration actually reduces power consumption due to increased sparsity
• Hierarchical Temporal Defense (HTD) framework achieving 18.7% gradient attack success and 25.1% temporal jitter success at 45 microjoules per inference

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