Self-repairing Hardware Paradigms based on Astrocyte-neuron Models

The human brain is remarkable in its ability to self-repair, for example following stroke or injury. Such self-repair results from a range of distributed and fine-grained mechanisms which act in tandem to ensure that the neurones (the basic building blocks in the brain) continue to function in as close to a normal state as possible.

In contrast modern electronic systems design typically relies on a single controller or processor, which has very limited self-repair capabilities. There is a pressing need to progress beyond current approaches and look for inspiration from biology to inform electronic systems design.

Recent studies have highlighted that interactions between astrocytes (a type of glial cell) and neurones in the brain provide a distributed cellular level repair capability where faults that impede or stop neuronal firing can be repaired by a re-adjustment of the local weights of connections between neurones in the brain.

This project aims to exploit these recent findings and develop a new generation of self-repairing algorithms by taking inspiration from these results to design a new generation of "astro-centric" algorithms. To achieve this we will include components representing both neurones and astrocytes in our electronic systems and model the interactions between these in such a way as to capture the distributed repair capabilities seen in the biological system.

Our project is "blue-skies research" at the cutting edge of bio-inspired design for next generation electronic systems. The project aims to develop computational tools, algorithms and robotic demonstrators to implement distributed, fine-grained repair in spiking neural networks that take inspiration from recent findings regarding biological brain repair mechanisms.

Economic impact.
We envisage that our project will have longer term economic impact. Uptake of our ideas by the UK electronics design industry has the potential to increase economic activity through additional exploitation routes for novel design principles. The UK is well placed to benefit from this research as 40% of European design houses are based in the UK. Exploitation routes are discussed in the pathways to impact document.

Societal impact
The research targets application areas in robotics as demonstrators. This choice was motivated in part to increase potential impact beyond the scientific community. Demonstration of robotic systems where a brain inspired electronic control system is able to respond to a range of fault scenarios has the potential to generate considerable publicity and associated impact to highlight bio-inspired Engineering research in the UK. Additionally, such reliable robots will be of benefit in the domain of assisted living. The research at Ulster will assist in the understanding of brain function/dysfunction and therefore impact in general mental health and well-being.