Why look to biology?
Some people strongly endorse the biomorphic approach to engineering,
wherein nature's successful designs and emulated to some appropriate
degree by engineers looking for a solution to a difficult problem.
Others question the validity of applying designs evolved in the medium
of proteins and enzymes to those of silicon, metal, polymers, and such.
My belief is that useful inspiration can be gained from nature's
time-tested strategies. However, one has to be careful in taking only
what's useful and cleanly applicable to another medium. An engineer
should not neglect existing and often elegant purely engineering
solutions because they fail to have an analog in biology.
- To the biologist:
Models are commonly used by scientists and engineers to enhance
understanding of complex topics, and to allow modification of the
parameters of the model without encountering all the complications
involved in modifying the system of interest itself.
I am interested in designing and building hardware models inspired by
biological systems. They should interact in real time with their
environment, free of the limitations of software models and the limits of
our abilities to define a complete environment in software. Thus, I
would like such a model to further our knowledge of the difficulties
that must be overcome to create a functioning system, as well as our gaps
in understanding of how nature solves the problems that
baffle human scientists and engineers.
- To the engineer:
Even simple animals are able to respond to
their environments in a far more robust manner than complex man-made robots.
For adequate and autonomous interaction between robots and their
environment, better and more numerous sensors are needed, bound by better
sensor integration techniques. This is the problem I will attack for my
PhD work. Furthermore, if it is to be useful, a control system
must ultimately be implemented in hardware rather than simply simulated.
Thus, my medium of choice will be to build actual circuits that implement
the algorithms.
