Initial Experiments of Reconfigurable Sensor Adapted by Evolution

Missions to planets with unknown environmental condition, have recently been approached with new ideas, such as use of biology-inspired mechanisms for hardware sensor adaptation. In this paper we describe the initial development of efficient mechanisms for smart sensing which will lead to higher quality data. The self-reconfigurable pre-processing analog electronics is based on evolvable hardware. 1 Introduction Modern sensors provide high data rates with only a small fraction of the data carrying quality information. The current pre-processing electronics is not smart enough to eliminate useless/redundant data and the on-board real-time processing capabilities are limited. These restrictions impose large on-board storage memory and high communications bandwidth. If the electronics could adapt to incoming signals and the context of the measurement, more information could be obtained from the sensor and sent back to earth. The concept of reconfigurable and adaptive electronics for signal conditioning has led to the design of a series of recent chips that allow programmable adjustment of amplifier gains, memory-based compensation of sensor non-linearity, etc [11]. However, the flexibility of these programmable devices is limited by the high level of reconfiguration granularity, and requires that all compensation data be predetermined through lab experiments and then stored in ROM; also no later changes in sensor characteristics or electronics itself could be considered once the sensor is in operation. A complementary technique, called evolvable hardware (EHW), allows the automatic determination of optimal electronic circuit configurations by evolutionary algorithms [1][2][3]. In particular, a chip designed for EHW experiments at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) called a Field Programmable Transistor Array (FPTA) has high flexibility by reconfiguration at transistor level [4][5][14][16]. EHW has also been considered for various application hardware, from antennas to complete evolvable space systems that could adapt to changing experimental environments and, moreover, increase their performance during the mission [15]. In this paper we describe the initial development of efficient mechanisms for smart on-board sensing, adaptively controlling the reconfigurable pre-processing analog electronics using EHW, which will lead to higher quality data. The target is to