The natural way to evolve hardware

Author

Thompson, Adrian ; Harvey, Inman ; Husbands, Philip

Author_Institution

Sch. of Cognitive & Comput. Sci., Sussex Univ., Brighton, UK

Volume

4

fYear

1996

fDate

12-15 May 1996

Firstpage

37

Abstract

Artificial evolution can automatically derive the configuration of a reconfigurable hardware system such that it performs a given task. Individuals of the evolving population are evaluated when instantiated as real circuits, so if constraints inherent to human design (but not to evolution) are dropped, then the natural physical dynamics of the hardware can be exploited in new ways. The notion of an artificially evolving `species´ (SAGA) allows the open-ended incremental evolution of complex circuits. Theoretical arguments are given, as well as the real-world example of an evolved hardware robot controller

Keywords

controllers; genetic algorithms; reconfigurable architectures; robots; SAGA; artificial evolution; complex circuit design; physical dynamics; reconfigurable hardware system; robot controller; species adaptation genetic algorithm; Automatic control; Electronic circuits; Fault tolerance; Field programmable gate arrays; Genetic algorithms; Hardware; Humans; Robot control; Robotics and automation; Space exploration;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Circuits and Systems, 1996. ISCAS '96., Connecting the World., 1996 IEEE International Symposium on

Conference_Location

Atlanta, GA

Print_ISBN

0-7803-3073-0

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ISCAS.1996.541895

Filename

541895