ERSA’2009
The International Conference on
Engineering of Reconfigurable Systems and Algorithms

Bio-Inspired Systems: Self-Adaptability from Chips to Sensor-Network Architectures

Dr. Gilles Sassatelli, University of Montpellier 2, France

The growing interest for pervasive systems that seamlessly interact with the environment motivates researches in the area of self-adaptability. Bio-inspiration is often regarded as an attractive alternative to the usual optimization techniques for it provides the capability to handle scenarios beyond the initial set of specifications. Such a feature is crucial for some applications domains such as pervasive sensor networks where nodes are distributed across a geographical area that renders on-site intervention difficult. The work presented in this paper aims at proposing a generic agent-based infrastructure that provides native support for bio-inspiration therefore enabling the population of nodes to learn and evolve. In this work, each node is made of a general purpose microprocessor attached to a specific bio-inspired reconfigurable integrated circuit that provides efficient support for the implementation of artificial neural networks. The bio-inspired agent-based programming framework allows synchonizing population-level mechanisms (evolution through distributed genetic algorithms) and node-level mechanisms (learning process utilizing the reconfigurable device). We demonstrate the features of the proposed solution on a fleet of vehicles that are equipped with some sensors, and show the self-adaptability features of the platform on some applications such as obstacle avoidance through collaborative learning.

Dr. Gilles Sassatelli holds a full-time researcher position at LIRMM and is responsible of the flexible parallel and reconfigurable architectures group. He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering in 2002 and has been working at the Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany as an assistant professor. He has been involved in several different funded national and European research projects and is the founder of the Reconfigurable Communication Centric SoCs European workshop. His research activity is currently focused on adaptive / bio-inspired reconfigurable computing systems ranging from MPSoCs to prospective bio-inspired computing substrates.