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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.
+-- (Score:-1, Moderator on Power Trip)
... 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.
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 use of FPGAs and other reconfigureable hardware along with genetic operators on the configuration is broadly lumped under the category of "Evolveable Hardware" and most of the people doing cutting-edge work in this arena will be at the GECCO conference down in Orlando next month. You can expect a few news blurbs based upon papers presented at this conference soon after...
BTW, the guy who did a lot of the initial work on this whom you are probably thinking of is Adrian Thompson. Alternatively you could have been thinking of Hugo DeGaris and the smoke and mirror game he has been running with the press for several years related to his CAM-Brain project (this is a variation of EHW whereby a cellular automata is used to generate random neural pathways/connections and then the system evolves the weightings.)
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.