{"title":"Non-evolvable indirectly replicating nanorobots with self-assembling parts","authors":"T. Toth-Fejel","doi":"10.1109/EH.2005.36","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/EH.2005.36","url":null,"abstract":"This paper summarizes work on a kinematic cellular automata (KCA) approach to nanoscale replicating robots. Initially funded by NIAC at General Dynamics, the findings include the following: (i) A precise formulation of the essential problem of machine replication can be described as follows: in a well-defined environment, a KCA indirectly replicating system (IRS) must assemble basic parts into symmetrical facets of modular dynamic cells configured into a hierarchy of subsystems: transporter, connector, and controller. (ii) A practical IRS needs a specific hierarchy that can be broken down in terms of structure, functionality, and control mechanisms, (iii) KCA offers a level of indirection that lowers the complexity (to less than that of a Pentium 4). (iv) Replication at a molecular level may improve cost and complexity by more than seven magnitudes. The results of modeling different aspects of the KCA IRS are also presented.","PeriodicalId":448208,"journal":{"name":"2005 NASA/DoD Conference on Evolvable Hardware (EH'05)","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116736600","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Complexity metrics for self-monitoring impact sensing networks","authors":"M. Prokopenko, Peter Wang, D. Price","doi":"10.1109/EH.2005.14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/EH.2005.14","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper we describe novel metrics measuring complexity in self-organising networks. The metrics are investigated within the context of decentralised inspections, developed and implemented as part of the joint CSIRO-NASA Ageless Aerospace Vehicle (AAV) research project. The AAV Concept Demonstrator is a hardware multi-cellular sensing and communication network which is expected to detect and react to multiple impacts, without any centralised controllers. We present an extension of an ant colony optimisation algorithm, using an adaptive dead reckoning scheme and producing robust and reconfigurable minimum spanning trees connecting autonomous AAV cells. We then introduce a new metric detecting emergence through irregularities in the multi-agent communications, and contrast it with conventional macro-level (\"global-view\") graph-theoretic metrics.","PeriodicalId":448208,"journal":{"name":"2005 NASA/DoD Conference on Evolvable Hardware (EH'05)","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127771756","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A case for using Minipop as the evolutionary engine in a CTRNN-EH control device: an analysis of area requirements and search efficacy","authors":"S. Vigraham, J. Gallagher","doi":"10.1109/EH.2005.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/EH.2005.1","url":null,"abstract":"Continuous time recurrent neural network-evolvable hardware (CTRNN-EH) control devices comprise of an analog continuous time recurrent neural network (CTRNN) with an on-board evolutionary algorithm (EA) engine to evolve the parameters of the neural network. These control devices were demonstrated to be effective for suppressing thermoacoustic (TA) instability in simulated jet engines. Currently, the construction of a VLSI CTRNN-EH device is underway for suppressing TA instability in a real combustion chamber while it is in operation. In this paper, we present a fully function digital EA engine for the CTRNN-EH control device. An ad-hoc hardware design is presented to realize space savings. The simulation and synthesis results of the hardware EA are presented. In addition to this, a demonstration of the efficacy of the EA across a noisy real world control problem is presented.","PeriodicalId":448208,"journal":{"name":"2005 NASA/DoD Conference on Evolvable Hardware (EH'05)","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125326210","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
E. Stomeo, T. Kalganova, Cyrille Lambert, N. Lipnitsakya, Y. Yatskevich
{"title":"On evolution of relatively large combinational logic circuits","authors":"E. Stomeo, T. Kalganova, Cyrille Lambert, N. Lipnitsakya, Y. Yatskevich","doi":"10.1109/EH.2005.37","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/EH.2005.37","url":null,"abstract":"Evolvable hardware (EHW) (Yao and Higuchi, 1999) is a technique introduced to automatically design circuits where the circuit configuration is carried out by evolutionary algorithms. One of the main difficulties in using EHW to solve real-world problems is the scalability. Until now, several strategies have been proposed to avoid this problem, but none of them completely tackle the issue. In this paper three different methods for evolving the most complex circuits have been tested for their scalability. These methods are bi-directional incremental evolution (SO-BIE); generalised disjunction decomposition (GD-BIE) and evolutionary strategies (ES) with dynamic mutation rate. In order to achieve the generalised conclusions the chosen approaches were tested using multipliers, traditionally used in EHW, but also logic circuits taken from MCNC (Yang, 1991) benchmark library and randomly generated circuits. The analysis of the approaches demonstrated that PLA-based ES is capable of evolving logic circuits of up to 12 inputs. The use of SO-BIE allows the generation of fully functional circuits of 14 inputs and GD-BIE is estimated to be able to evolve circuits of 21 inputs.","PeriodicalId":448208,"journal":{"name":"2005 NASA/DoD Conference on Evolvable Hardware (EH'05)","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128239262","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Enabling the on-line intrinsic evolution of analog controllers","authors":"D. Gwaltney, M. I. Ferguson","doi":"10.1109/EH.2005.21","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/EH.2005.21","url":null,"abstract":"The intrinsic evolution of analog controllers to provide closed-loop control of the speed of a DC motor has been previously demonstrated at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. A side effect of the evolutionary process is that during evolution there are necessarily poor configurations to be evaluated that could cause damage to the plant. This paper concerns the development and implementation of a safe evolvable analog controller (EAC) architecture able to evolve controllers on-line even in the presence of these poor configurations. The EAC concept is discussed and experimental results are presented that show the feasibility of the approach. This EAC architecture represents the first in a series of steps required to make deployment of an evolvable controller a reality.","PeriodicalId":448208,"journal":{"name":"2005 NASA/DoD Conference on Evolvable Hardware (EH'05)","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132858967","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On the robustness achievable with stochastic development processes","authors":"S. Viswanathan, J. Pollack","doi":"10.1109/EH.2005.38","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/EH.2005.38","url":null,"abstract":"Manufacturing processes are a key source of faults in complex hardware systems. Minimizing this impact of manufacturing uncertainties is one way towards achieving fault tolerant systems. By treating manufacturing as a stochastic development process, we characterize some of the constraints limiting the levels of robustness that can be achieved with evolution. The analysis is by introducing a novel abstraction of development as a strategic decision-making process. Using this abstraction to analyze a toy-system that simulates a process of noisy assembly, we compare the maximum robustness achievable with adaptive and non-adaptive developmental strategies. Even in this highly simplified setup, the optimal adaptive and non-adaptive genotypes reveals a significant empirical difference in their robustness characteristics. This suggests that the choice of developmental strategy and the properties of the setup are major constraints on the robustness achievable, even prior to evolution-related considerations.","PeriodicalId":448208,"journal":{"name":"2005 NASA/DoD Conference on Evolvable Hardware (EH'05)","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132627727","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Evolving assembly plans for fully automated design and assembly","authors":"John Rieffel, J. Pollack","doi":"10.1109/EH.2005.27","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/EH.2005.27","url":null,"abstract":"Evolutionary design has demonstrated great potential to automatically generate a wide array of novel, interesting, and human-competitive designs. Few of these evolved designs, however, have in turn been physically manufacture. This is due largely to the fact that most evolved designs only specify what to build, and carry no information on how, or even if, a designed object can be assembled in the real world. When the goal is a physical object, rather than a mere schematic, substantial further effort, most often human-level, is subsequently required to develop a physical assembly process. Evolution of such descriptive representations therefore stands as an obstacle to the full automation of both design and assembly. In this paper we describe an alternative, the evolution of prescriptive representations, which offers to remove human effort from the design-and-assembly loop.","PeriodicalId":448208,"journal":{"name":"2005 NASA/DoD Conference on Evolvable Hardware (EH'05)","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126111917","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Autonomous FPGA fault handling through competitive runtime reconfiguration","authors":"R. Demara, Kening Zhang","doi":"10.1109/EH.2005.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/EH.2005.11","url":null,"abstract":"An autonomous self-repair approach for SRAM-based FPGAs is developed based on competitive runtime reconfiguration (CRR). Under the CRR technique, an initial population of functionally identical (same input-output behavior), yet physically distinct (alternative design or place-and-route realization) FPGA configurations is produced at design time. At run-time, these individuals compete for selection based on a fitness function favoring fault-free behavior. Hence, any physical resource exhibiting an operationally-significant fault decreases the fitness of those configurations which use it. Through runtime competition, the presence of the fault becomes occluded from the visibility of subsequent FPGA operations. Meanwhile, the offspring formed through crossover and mutation of faulty and viable configurations are reintroduced into the population. This enables evolution of a customized fault-specific repair, realized directly as new configurations using the FPGA's normal throughput processing operations. Multiple phases of the fault handling process including detection, isolation, diagnosis, and recovery are integrated into a single cohesive approach. FPGA-based multipliers are examined as a case study demonstrating evolution of a complete repair for a 3-bit /spl times/ 3-bit multiplier from several stuck-at-faults within a few thousand iterations. Repairs are evolved in-situ, in real-time, without test vectors, while allowing the FPGA to remain partially online.","PeriodicalId":448208,"journal":{"name":"2005 NASA/DoD Conference on Evolvable Hardware (EH'05)","volume":"49 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123291353","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A VHDL core for intrinsic evolution of discrete time filters with signal feedback","authors":"D. Gwaltney, K. Dutton","doi":"10.1109/EH.2005.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/EH.2005.6","url":null,"abstract":"The design of an evolvable machine VHDL Core is presented, representing a discrete-time processing structure capable of supporting control system applications. This VHDL Core is implemented in an FPGA and is interfaced with an evolutionary algorithm implemented in firmware on a digital signal processor (DSP) to create an evolvable system platform. The salient features of this architecture are presented. The capability to implement IIR filter structures is presented along with the results of the intrinsic evolution of a filter. The robustness of the evolved filter design is tested and its unique characteristics are described.","PeriodicalId":448208,"journal":{"name":"2005 NASA/DoD Conference on Evolvable Hardware (EH'05)","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114236145","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Practical concerns when evolving circuits impervious to anticipated faults","authors":"G. Greenwood","doi":"10.1109/EH.2005.39","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/EH.2005.39","url":null,"abstract":"Fault tolerance is a necessary ingredient of autonomous circuitry and evolvable hardware has proven to be an effective fault recovery method. In this paper we show for a certain type of fault, called an anticipated fault, in-situ reconfiguration is not necessary.","PeriodicalId":448208,"journal":{"name":"2005 NASA/DoD Conference on Evolvable Hardware (EH'05)","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129405963","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}