45 research outputs found
Towards a Plant Bio-Machine
Plants are very efficient computing machines. They are able to sense diverse environmental conditions and quickly react through chemical and electrical signaling. In this paper, we present an interface between plants and machines (a cybernetic plant), with the goal of augmenting the capabilities of plants towards the creation of plant biosensors. We implement a data acquisition system able to stimulate the plant through different electrical signals, as well as record the electrical activity of plants in response to changing electrical stimulations, light conditions, and chemicals. The results serve as a proof of concept that sensing capabilities of plants are a viable option for the development of plant bio-machines. Different future scenarios (some speculative) are discussed. The work herein is carried out as a collaboration between the EU project Flora Robotica and the EU project NASCENCE
CA-NEAT: Evolved Compositional Pattern Producing Networks for Cellular Automata Morphogenesis and Replication
Cellular Automata (CA) are a remarkable example of morphogenetic system, where cells grow and self-organise through local interactions. CA have been used as abstractions of biological development and artificial life. Such systems have been able to show properties that are often desirable but difficult to achieve in engineered systems, e.g. morphogenesis and replication of regular patterns without any form of centralized coordination. However, cellular systems are hard to program (i.e. evolve) and control, especially when the number of cell states and neighbourhood increase. In this paper, we propose a new principle of morphogenesis based on Compositional Pattern Producing Networks (CPPNs), an abstraction of development that has been able to produce complex structural motifs without local interactions. CPPNs are used as Cellular Automata genotypes and evolved with a NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT) algorithm. This allows complexification of genomes throughout evolution with phenotypes emerging from self-organisation through development based on local interactions. In this paper, the problems of 2D pattern morphogenesis and replication are investigated. Results show that CA-NEAT is an appropriate means of approaching cellular systems engineering, especially for future applications where natural levels of complexity are targeted. We argue that CA-NEAT could provide a valuable mapping for morphogenetic systems, beyond cellular automata systems, where development through local interactions is desired
A general representation of dynamical systems for reservoir computing
Dynamical systems are capable of performing computation in a reservoir
computing paradigm. This paper presents a general representation of these
systems as an artificial neural network (ANN). Initially, we implement the
simplest dynamical system, a cellular automaton. The mathematical fundamentals
behind an ANN are maintained, but the weights of the connections and the
activation function are adjusted to work as an update rule in the context of
cellular automata. The advantages of such implementation are its usage on
specialized and optimized deep learning libraries, the capabilities to
generalize it to other types of networks and the possibility to evolve cellular
automata and other dynamical systems in terms of connectivity, update and
learning rules. Our implementation of cellular automata constitutes an initial
step towards a general framework for dynamical systems. It aims to evolve such
systems to optimize their usage in reservoir computing and to model physical
computing substrates.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, accepted workshop paper at Workshop on Novel
Substrates and Models for the Emergence of Developmental, Learning and
Cognitive Capabilities at IEEE ICDL-EPIROB 201
Gardening Cyber-Physical Systems
cote interne IRCAM: Stepney12aNational audienceToday’s artefacts, from small devices to buildings and cities, are, or are becoming, cyber-physical socio-technical systems, with tightly interwoven material and computational parts. Currently, we have to la- boriously build such systems, component by component, and the results are often difficult to maintain, adapt, and reconfigure. Even “soft”ware is brittle and non-trivial to adapt and change. If we look to nature, how- ever, large complex organisms grow, adapt to their environment, and repair themselves when damaged. In this position paper, we present Gro-CyPhy, an unconventional computational framework for growing cyber-physical systems from com- putational seeds, and gardening the growing systems, in order to adapt them to specific needs. The Gro-CyPhy architecture comprises: a Seed Factory, a process for designing specific computational seeds to meet cyber-physical system requirements; a Growth Engine, providing the computational processes that grow seeds in simulation; and a Computational Garden, where mul- tiple seeds can be planted and grown in concert, and where a high-level gardener can shape them into complex cyber-physical systems. We outline how the Gro-CyPhy architecture might be applied to a significant exemplar application: a (simulated) skyscraper, comprising several mutually interdependent physical and virtual subsystems, such as the shell of exterior and interior walls, electrical power and data net- works, plumbing and rain-water harvesting, heating and air-conditioning systems, and building management control systems
Persistence and Availability of Web Services in Computational Biology
We have conducted a study on the long-term availability of bioinformatics Web services: an observation of 927 Web services published in the annual Nucleic Acids Research Web Server Issues between 2003 and 2009