The “modeling clay” approach to bio-inspired electronic hardware

Abstract

The field of evolvable hardware or bio-inspired hardware holds the promise of automatically engineering complex electronic systems that remain adaptive during use. A growing number of experiments along these lines have been performed recently, mostly using off-the-shelf hardware or straightforward extensions of building blocks used by human engineers [1] [2]. In this paper we use the POE (Phylogeny Ontogeny Epigenesis) framework of bio-inspired hardware systems [3] and restrict evolutionary search and development considerations to pure hill-climbing search only, in order to develop some theory around evolution of electronic circuits. From this theory a new analog re-configurable hardware architecture is proposed for use in evolvable hardware. The hardware is a context switchable analog computer which can implement any general non-linear dynamic system on the level of the vector field representation. The optimization algorithm is a bio-inspired “molding” of the state-space description of the system. We call this novel hardware/ optimization algorithm platform the “modeling clay” approach to bio-inspired electronic hardware.