BIO-Inspired Electronics

Current Projects

• Reconfigurable Device Fault Detection and Self Repair
• Intrinsic Evolution of Analogue Spiking Neural Networks
• Circuit Synthesis Modelled On Cellular Development
• On-chip Digital Evolution Using Virtex2Pro
• Plasticity and Learning in Evolved Autonomous Systems using Spiking Neural Networks

Inspiration

• Over millions of years evolution in nature has optimised and adapted species that survive and thrive within their environment

Mission Statement

• Investigate, mimic and adapt concepts and mechanisms found in the biological world that ensure species survival to inspire the development of novel self-reconfiguring electronic and computational systems

Research Objectives

• Fully autonomous, self-reconfiguring, evolving electronic systems
• Highly optimised and adapted evolved electronic systems incorporating autonomous fault detection and self-repair
• Detecting unexpected environment or behaviour change and self-evolving to recover system behaviour
• Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) for autonomous robotics applications
• Techniques for efficient evolution on digital and analogue reconfigurable devices
• Reconfigurable device fault detection and self-repair
• Evolve to achieve optimal signal processing, self-repair and improved performance
• Circuit synthesis modelled on cellular development

Evolvable Hardware : a brief summary

• Evolvable hardware is an emerging field
• Increasing number of researchers and conferences
• Adaptive techniques are being employed by industry (space)
• New architectures and reconfigurable devices are being developed
• Using evolutionary methods to produce designs which would otherwise exist outside the human design space.
• Genetic Programming methods have produced patented designs
• Humies competition measure innovation (human-competitive results produced by some form of genetic and evolutionary computation)
• To date, relatively small hardware and software systems have been evolved
• A number of function level reconfigurable chips are now available (PACT, RICA 
  Indirect methods for evolving circuits are being published 

Enabling Technologies used in NUI Galway

• Reconfigurable digital platform, FPGA (Xilinx Virtex)
• Reconfigurable analogue platform, FPAA (Anadigm)
• Spiking Neural Networks
• Robotics, sensors and actuators (ultrasound, motor, luminescence detector)
• Genetic Algorithms
• Java/JBits, C , Python
• Embedded processors : PicoBlaze, Microblaze, PowerPC
• uCLinux
• EDA Toolsuites : Xilinx ISE/EDK