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. "

Comments

You can actually experiment with the concepts

[substrate]

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.