We’ve all seen the movie Apollo 13, where Tom Hanks and co. end up having to repair their spacecraft using … even I cannot finish that analogy. What I should say is that when the crewmembers of Apollo 13 in 1970 were confronted with a dead spacecraft, they had to make makeshift repairs using very basic and, at times, crude materials.
What about more recent spacecraft mishaps, like the continued refitting and fixing of Hubble and the ISS, or possibly the most publicized space machines acting up, the Mars rovers.
How much easier for the crew of the Apollo 13, for the controllers of Hubble or Spirit and Opportunity, if each device was capable of repairing itself? That is the question that Ali Akoglu and his students at The University of Arizona are working on, in an attempt to create self-healing machinery.
An assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering at the UoA, Akoglu is using Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA’s) to build what he hopes, will be self healing tech systems. Using a combination of software and hardware, FPGA’s are able to reconfigure themselves at the chip level. Because at this chip level, certain hardwarical functions are carried out, an FPGA’s firmware can be reconfigured to emulate different types of hardware.
Akoglu explains what his project is attempting to create like this. Consider the computer that you are reading this on right now. It may be top of the line, special in every way, and acquire more attention than your life partner, but in reality, it is extremely slow compared with hardwired systems.
With hardwired systems, instead of building a machine that is capable of carrying out a variety of tasks, they are built for a specific purpose.
“In that case, you have an extremely fast system, but it’s not adaptable,” Akoglu explained. “When new and better software comes along, you have to go back into the design cycle and start building hardware from scratch. What we need is something in the middle that is the best of both worlds, and that’s what I’m trying to come up with using Field Programmable Arrays."
Along with his students, Akoglu is currently testing five hardware units that are together linked via a wireless network. “When we create a test malfunction, we try to recover in two ways,” he explained. “First, the unit tries to heal itself at the node level by reprogramming the problem circuits.”
However, if that fails, the next step for the unit is to employ redundant circuitry to replace or replicate the fried systems.
Suffering a failure in that department as well, a third step is taken by alerting another unit within the group via the network, which will allow that second unit to – in addition to its own duties – pick up the critical tasks left by the broken unit.
Subsequently, if a second unit goes down, and both are unable to fix themselves, the three remaining robots distribute the new workload amongst themselves, using their own redundant circuitry or reprogrammed circuits to fill in what they aren’t already able to do.
Joshua Hill, a Geek’s-Geek from Melbourne, Australia, Josh is an aspiring author with dreams of publishing his epic fantasy, currently in the works, sometime in the next 5 years. A techie, nerd, sci-fi nut and bookworm.
