Bioplausible approaches to control using highly distributed, slow computing

Abstract:

Current techniques for the design of software-enabled control systems rely on the existence of high performance sensing, actuation and computational devices that can be embedded within a physical system at modest cost. In this talk, I will discuss control approaches that lie at the other end of the computational spectrum: we seek to develop new principles and tools for the design of closed loop control systems using highly distributed, but slow, computational elements. Long term application areas for such approaches include the design of control systems using novel computing substrates, such as extremely low power computational units or biological circuits encoded in engineered DNA. Our initial results include bootstrapable methods for vision-based navigation using bilinear computations and delay-based control system design.