An innovative bio-inspired fault tolerant unitronics architecture

This paper presents the first implementation results of a novel Unitronics (Unicellular Electronics) architecture based system that uses a bio-inspired prokaryotic model. It is a programmable cellular FPGA-like system inspired by unicellular bacterial organisms, and transposes self-healing and fault tolerant properties of nature to electronics systems. An e-puck object avoidance robot controller was built to demonstrate all the underlying theories of our research, the validity of the bioinspired model and the capabilities of the Unitronics architecture that it facilitated. The robot successfully demonstrated that it was able to cope with multiple, simultaneously occurring faults. Integrity of the system is continuously monitored on-line, and if a fault is detected its location is automatically identified. Detection will trigger a self-repair mechanism and only when it is complete will normal system operation resume.