Over the past 20 years, there has been a quiet growth in the number of
researchers looking to biology for inspiration for developing
computational and robotics systems. This should not be surprising
because throughout history many innovators have used ideas from nature
in their designs. As examples we have Leonardo da Vinci's (
circa 1493)
"helicopter" which is based on sycamore seeds, and Gaudi's (
circa
1910) Casa Mila was inspired by nautilus shells. In a similar vein, in
the late 1980s Carver Mead, who was one of the pioneers of integrated
circuits, made the observation that electron transport in silicon field
effect transistors was similar to the ion transport in nerve cells, and
therefore suggested that integrated circuits may be used to design
computers and sensors that operate like our brains, eyes and ears. This
approach seeded the development of the Neuromorphic Engineering field,
and is now well established across the globe (see
www.ine-web.org)
germinated, grew and spread, researchers started looking at the entire
organism for inspiration, thereby migrating from Neuromorphic to
Biomorphic Engineering. Recently, the field has taken another lurch
towards Biomorphic Cognition Engineering, in an effort to host
perceptive and cognitive processes in engineered bodies such as
computers and robots.
Prof. Etienne-Cummings has been involved in Neurormorphic and Biomorphic
Engineering from their inceptions, and he will describe the evolution of
the field through his work. He will start by motivating his work on
visual information processing, modeling the biological retina and parts
of the visual cortex, and then focus on this recent research on modeling
the spinal cord locomotion networks in silicon. Using these models, he
will show that a "paralyzed" animal can be made to work again, implying
that these systems may be useful in helping individuals with spinal cord
injuries. Finally, he will speculate about what the future holds for
this research, particularly in the area of fully neurally integrated
prosthetic limbs and biomorphic robots.
