Embryonics: A path to artificial life?

Electronic systems, no matter how clever and intelligent they are, cannot yet demonstrate the reliability that biological systems can. Perhaps we can learn from these processes, which have developed through millions of years of evolution, in our pursuit of highly reliable systems. This article discusses how such systems, inspired by biological principles, might be built using simple embryonic cells. We illustrate how they can monitor their own functional integrity in order to protect themselves from internal failure or from hostile environmental effects and how faults caused by DNA mutation or cell death can be repaired and thus full system functionality restored. ©2006 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Unicellular self-healing electronic array

This paper presents on-line fault detection and fault repair capability of our Unitronics architecture, based on a bio-inspired prokaryotic bacterial colony model. At the device programming level, it appears as a cellular FPGA-like system; however, underlying structures transpose it into an inherently self-healing and fault tolerant electronics system. An e-puck object avoidance robot controller was built to demonstrate all the underlying theories of our research. The robot successfully demonstrated that it was able to cope with multiple, simultaneously occurring faults on-line whilst the robot was being controlled to move in a „figure 8‟-like manner. Integrity of the system is continuously monitored on-line, and if a fault is detected its location is automatically identified. Detection will trigger an on-line self-repair process. The amount of repair only depends on the number of spare cells the system is equipped with. The embedded fault repair mechanism uses significantly less memory for gene storage and considerably less hardware overall for target system implementation than any previously proposed bio-inspired architecture

Towards evolving fault tolerant biologically inspired hardware using evolutionary algorithms

Embryonic hardware systems satisfy the fundamental characteristics found in nature which contribute to the development of any multi-cellular living being. Attempts of researchers' in this field to learn from nature have yielded promising results; they proved the feasibility of applying nature-like mechanisms to the world of digital electronics with self-diagnostic and self-healing characteristics, Design by humans however often results in very complex hardware architectures, requiring a large amount of manpower and computational resources. A wider objective is to find novel solutions to design such complex architectures for Embryonic Systems, by problem decomposition and unique design methodologies so that system functionality and performance will not be compromised. Design automation using reconfigurable hardware and EA (evolutionary algorithm), such as GA (genetic algorithms), is one way to tackle this issue. This concept applies the notion of EHW (evolvable hardware) to the problem domain. Unlocking the power of EHW for both novel design solutions and for circuit optimisation has attracted many researchers since the early '90s. The promise of using genetic algorithms through evolvable hardware design will, in this paper, be demonstrated by the authors by evolving a relatively simple combinatorial logic circuit (full-adder)

Evolving cell array configurations using CGP

A cell array is a proposed type of custom FPGA, where digital circuits can be formed from interconnected configurable cells. In this paper we have presented a means by which CGP might be adapted to evolve configurations of a proposed cell array. As part of doing so, we have suggested an additional genetic operator that exploits modularity by copying sections of the genome within a solution, and investigated its efficacy. Additionally, we have investigated applying selection pressure for parsimony during functional evolution, rather than in a subsequent stage as proposed in other work. Our results show that solutions to benchmark problems can be evolved with a good degree of efficiency, and that compact solutions can be found with no significant impact on the required number of circuit evaluations. © 2011 Springer-Verlag

Novel bio-inspired approach for fault-tolerant VLSI systems

Living organisms are complex systems, and yet they possess extremely high degrees of reliability. Since failures are local, their repair will often be taken on the local (cell) level. Engineers have long sought systems that could offer similar reliability and have relatively recently started trying to integrate ideas inspired by nature into the modern silicon technology of today. While bio-inspired proposals inspired by multicellular systems demonstrated feasibility, the resulting systems were often unduly complex. We are proposing a radically new methodology inspired by the characteristics, morphology, and behavior of simpler prokaryotic bacteria and bacterial communities. The hypothesis we use is that such simple unicellular organisms could help to build simpler cost effective systems, but with improved reliability than hitherto achieved by other methods. The result is a cellular array-based fault-tolerant electronic system with online self-test and self-repair capability. These ideas are simulated, tested, and verified through the successful construction of demonstrators: a proportional, integral, and differential and a robot controller. This paper discusses the underlying biological principles that guide our research and the bio-inspired model that we have derived. It also gives a detailed circuit and system description of the architecture and its run-time self-diagnostic and self-repair capability. © 2012 IEEE