Unicellular Self-Healing Electronic Array

This paper presents on-line fault detection and fault repair capability of our Unitronics architecture, based on a bio-inspired prokaryotic bacterial colony model. At the device programming level, it appears as a cellular FPGA-like system; however, underlying structures transpose it into an inherently self-healing and fault tolerant electronics system. An e-puck object avoidance robot controller was built to demonstrate all the underlying theories of our research. The robot successfully demonstrated that it was able to cope with multiple, simultaneously occurring faults on-line whilst the robot was being controlled to move in a "figure 8"-like manner. Integrity of the system is continuously monitored on-line, and if a fault is detected its location is automatically identified. Detection will trigger an on-line self-repair process. The amount of repair only depends on the number of spare cells the system is equipped with. The embedded fault repair mechanism uses significantly less memory for gene storage and considerably less hardware overall for target system implementation than any previously proposed bio-inspired architecture. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.