With NSF support, North Carolina A&T State University will establish an interdisciplinary research and education infrastructure for Biomimetic Autonomous Systems Engineering (BASE). A multi-disciplinary team will explore biologically-inspired approaches to system adaptation, fault-tolerance and reconfiguration. The project will explore the phenomena of self-adaptation and reconfiguration/organization in natural biological systems, and develop a theoretical framework for self-reconfigurable systems. The project will also design and evaluate biomimetic mechanisms and algorithms for future metamorphic autonomous systems.
The research team will conduct three major investigations. First, the key factors that enable biological systems to be functionally adaptive and operationally reliable will be investigated. Second, systematic studies on how to use these principles as a source of inspiration to design robust and fault-tolerant systems will be conducted. These principles will be formalized as algorithms and strategies, with explicit primitives, means of reasoning, self-learning and organization, thus providing a framework for the design and analysis of systems with adaptive and fault-tolerant capabilities. Finally, evaluation of the developed methods will be conducted using the university's laboratory facilities and those of collaborators.
The intellectual merit of the project lies not only in the identification and characterization of the biologically-inspired principles and strategies related to system adaptation and robustness, but also the ultimate incorporation of these principles into the design of autonomous systems to achieve fault-tolerant and reconfigurable capabilities. The broader impact of the project lies in the project's contributions to the understanding of various problems in the study of biocomplexity and its application to engineering.
