Evolvable Hardware for Space Applications

This paper focuses on characteristics and applications of evolvable hardware (EHW) to space systems, and describes research directions and ongoing work at JPL. Our motivation for looking at EHW is the need for more autonomous adaptive space systems. Even with a best design, incoqmrating the most advanced flight qualified technology at the time, and considering what is known about the environments it will operate in, during long missions the hardware becomes no longer optimal. On-board computers can be reprogrammed by uploading software, however the computing hardware becomes obsolete, and the sensing hardware may face situations outside its initial design specs, which makes the ideas of reconfigurable and evolvable hardware attractive. As safety of space systems is most critical, and inappropriate controls can be fatal, at this stage the application of space evolval-k hardware is seen mainly in evolving adapted sensors and sensory information processing systems. The EHW directions explored at JPL include (I) intrinsic evolution on analog ASICS, which we demonstrated on a custom analog neural chip, (2) evolution of analog electronic circuits at CMOS transistor level, which is work in progress, (3) evolution of dynamical systems in state-space representations, for which a “modeling clay” approach was proposed, partly demonstrated in hardware, (4) evolution of algorithms for onboard signal processing, where we addressed Iossless compression, for which we obtai ncd compression ratios superior to that of the best Iossless