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Satellite's Circuits Emulate Nervous System
desslok writes "A new type of attitude-control system will be put to the
test this August when it is launched into orbit as part of
the Swedish Hugin satellite. The new board, developed
by researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory, in
N.M., comes directly out of research that uses analog
electronics to simulate the nervous systems of real
animals. "
I thought the all important question was:
Is it based off of alien technology out of Roswell? -NG
+--
Given infinite time, 100 monkeys could type out the complete works of Shakespeare.
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It sounds very much like the kind of force-feedback stuff that was done before digital got popular. Is this really new? OTOH, has anyone heard anything more about the guy using Field Programmable Gate Arrays(FPGA) programmed using genetic algorithms to generate extremely efficient feedback/neural net type circuitry on a single chip? I think the article I read was in Discover Magazine some months ago (even stripped of the typical Discover over-hype, it sounded quite interesting, and quite a bit more newsworthy than this.)
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
... but when I first read the blurb, I thought this was an article about thought control, beamed down from satellites.
That's right, they'll decide that man is a pestilence and take over the orbiting nuke sats and vaporize us all from orbit.
BTW does anyone else think that combining a SDI-type particle beam with the Hubble telescope would make for a cool way to assassinate individual people from orbit?
Posted by The Mongolian Barbecue:
we must stop this before it is too late! Nooooo!
... someone with a clue has built this sort of thing.
This will be really handy for exploring the likes of Mars, dismantling old nuclear reactors, and whoo knows what.
I wonder if anyone's simulated this type of "behaviour" on a (digital) computer? Imagine if such a program, responding to external stimulii could reprogram itself in response and "grow more circuits" ie learn.
Perhaps we have the first tentative steps to passing the Turing test?
Time for humans to sit back and let the machines do all the work.
Well, maybe not.
I'm out of my tree just now but please feel free to leave a banana.
Uh - did you actually READ the article? It talks about analog control systems with neural networks - in other words, something that is designed to do a specific task! Its not something programmable and therefor no, you cant run Linux on it.
It's not related to fuzzy logic. You're correct in that fuzzy logic uses analog values rather than discrete. Normal boolean logic assumes a statement is true or it is false. Like a simple thermostat, if the temperature falls below some threshold, turn on the heat:
/* is it cold? */
if(Temperature 60) {
turn on the heat
}
Fuzzy logic assigns a value for the truth of the
statement. Rather than just being cold there is a degree of cold, and there can be a degree of hot. So based on the relative strengths of the two assertions you can control the amount of cooling or heating provided in a continuous manner.
A lot of respectable engineers feel that fuzzy logic is bunk, look up some of Bob Pease's articles in Electronic Design for some not so favourable reviews. A lot of others don't.
The article mentions Mark Tilden and his colleagues as the pioneers of this technology. Some of you might remember Mark Tilden as the creator of Beam Robotics:
http://nis-www.lanl.gov/robot/
This Digital Nervous Network is based on work by Mark Tilden as the article mentions. What wasn't really mentioned (aside from it being built from el-cheapo parts) is that there is a large hobbiest community who builds these things.
Essentially they're based on wiring an even number of inverting stages together. Normally this would settle on some ugly analog value that the gates really aren't designed to. By letting motors perturb the gates inputs via RC coupling the outputs of the gates will go into patterns of digital signals. In the proper conditions these signals can be amplified to drive motors in a walking type motion. Further perturbations change the gate of the walk etc.
The community is called BEAM robotics.
Actaully, no, because the monkeys would probably die first. In fact if we assume reporduction, AND that their typing instruments never break or lose power, they would probably stand a better chance of evolving to human intellegence before finishing, and then they would not be monkeys (biologically speaking).
Sorry, totally offtopic
I find it interesting that this is the first beam concept to make it to orbit. esp. considering all the stuff that went into pixelsats.
(for the layman, a pixelsat was a concept for a simple spy satelite with very low weight, cost, and resolution. the idea was to launch a whole bunch and network them -- beowulf imaging if you will. The thing that had to do with BEAM was that they utilized a device known as a solarengine.
Imagine a way to amplify and store electricity from solar panels to run a system intermittently in lower-than-optimal light. It's a pretty simple cicuit that can be built from cheap components that are fairly space hardy without modification. the pixelsats were to use the current from the SE to drive a magnetic coil and maintain position by thrusting against the earth's magnetosphere, a design based upon the MagBot, a pretty little piece of robotartwork that used a slick, thin surface and another magnet to thrust against.)
Analog processing is simply better for some things than digital, and it's been my firm belief that when technology allowed sufficient miniturization and flexibility in analog circuitry, we would see a resurgence of interest in analog techniques, especially in areas such as sensing and response.
My original background is in robotics and automation - one reason I left the field was the nagging feeling that we were being forced to work with a kludge - it was apparent even in the mid-80's that we needed something like neural systems to significantly advance the state of the art. A hybrid analog/digital system based on Rodney Brooks-style control layers would offer a reasonable promise of a robot that can successfully mimic a rudimentary "intelligence".
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that we may truly be witnessing the beginnings of a renaissance in analog computing and signal processing. Announcements like the one above, and the fact that people are finally succeeding in building microscopic low-power vacuum tubes (ideal for this sort of stuff), lead me to believe we may see analog applied more and more often in areas where it has real benefits over digital.
Another take on cathedrals:
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Technolust. So long as Kate is more important, it's fine with me.
The slashdot article on Starbridge systems is here. You can find all the slashdot archives at older stuff.
As with most of the Slashdot commenters, I dont find Starbridge very credible. I'll believe it when it's sitting on my desk crunching one of my programs and not until then.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
I'm sorry, it doesn't get anywhere near 165F at 80% humidity in Yuma, AZ. Maybe 130F at 50% humidity. Though I do like the idea of "disposable robots" to do dangerous stuff :)
Now I can see that this differs from what is described here, as fuzzy logic does not require a neural net. But if I understand the article (and discussion) correctly, the networks described here uses analog, and not digital signals. Is that a necessary requirement, or could such a nervous system be built on top of digital signals as well? I am not talking about emulating an analog system using a digital system, which is definitely doable (and probably much more efficient during the development phase).
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.