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

SABRE: A bio-inspired fault-tolerant electronic architecture

As electronic devices become increasingly complex, ensuring their reliable, fault-free operation is becoming correspondingly more challenging. It can be observed that, in spite of their complexity, biological systems are highly reliable and fault tolerant. Hence, we are motivated to take inspiration for biological systems in the design of electronic ones. In SABRE (self-healing cellular architectures for biologically inspired highly reliable electronic systems), we have designed a bio-inspired fault-tolerant hierarchical architecture for this purpose. As in biology, the foundation for the whole system is cellular in nature, with each cell able to detect faults in its operation and trigger intra-cellular or extra-cellular repair as required. At the next level in the hierarchy, arrays of cells are configured and controlled as function units in a transport triggered architecture (TTA), which is able to perform partial-dynamic reconfiguration to rectify problems that cannot be solved at the cellular level. Each TTA is, in turn, part of a larger multi-processor system which employs coarser grain reconfiguration to tolerate faults that cause a processor to fail. In this paper, we describe the details of operation of each layer of the SABRE hierarchy, and how these layers interact to provide a high systemic level of fault tolerance. © 2013 IOP Publishing Ltd

METAMORPHIC MEMORY BASED BIO-INSPIRED RECONFIGURABLE CELLULAR SYSTEMS

Abstract – Living beings in nature are made up of structurally identical cells, where each cell contains a copy of its DNA, the unique characteristic of the individual. This DNA is like a memory. It remembers and defines the behaviour of the individual and remains constant throughout its life time. An artificial embryonic cell contains a similar memory map where the specific ‘gene ’ it executes determines the functionality of the cell. An electronic system is then constructed by interconnecting a large number of identical cells. Each cell, similarly to nature, executes only a segment (gene) of the DNA and thus they all demonstrate different behaviour. However these cells will collectively determine the characteristic and configuration of the target system. This paper proposes a novel gene selection algorithm that doesn’t use the common address decoding approach and provides easier reconfiguration of systems for a different behaviour

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