Cochlea-inspired Wireless Compressive Sensing Architectures for Real-time Feedback Control Applications

反馈控制系统被广泛用于控制在机械（例如，飞行器的飞行控制）和土木工程（例如，地震时建筑物的反应缓解）。无线通信已被提议作为构成反馈控制系统的传感器、致动器和控制器的通信介质。 虽然无线通信可以显著降低与控制系统的制造相关联的成本，但是它们同时引入了一组新的技术挑战，包括功率限制、较低的通信速度和降低的系统鲁棒性。 本项目研究人类耳蜗和听觉神经系统如何获取、传递和处理声学信息，旨在模拟其在无线反馈控制系统中的工作原理。 在生物神经电路中发现的节能和实时处理架构有望解决反馈控制应用中与无线遥测相关的长期性能瓶颈。 考虑到社会日常使用的反馈控制系统的普遍性，这项研究对美国经济的影响是巨大的。 此外，该项目还引入了生物启发工程的创新工程课程，并吸引了来自代表性不足群体的中学生，以激励他们追求STEM职业。 研究工作的首要目标是应用神经生物学领域的神经脉冲序列编码方法，以解决网络反馈控制系统中与无线通信相关的功耗，速度和鲁棒性挑战。 该团队将研究哺乳动物耳蜗的感觉神经原理，并将这些原理用作节能无线传感器的功能基础，该传感器将传感器数据调制成数字脉冲串信号，使用码分多址（CDMA）通信方案直接传送到射频频谱。该项目还将研究常见的神经基序，作为将反馈控制律映射到复杂神经电路的功能块，这些神经电路处理由耳蜗启发的无线传感器节点产生的尖峰序列信号。其结果将是一个生物启发的无线反馈控制系统，该系统在传感前端实现压缩传感策略，并使用经过训练以实现所需反馈控制律的神经电路在系统后端实时处理尖峰序列信号。 这项工作的智力意义在于，它通过采用生物神经电路的操作原理来正式确定工程反馈控制系统的新设计范式，从而开辟了新的领域。

Feedback control systems are widely used to control the performance of dynamic systems found in mechanical (e.g., flight control of aircraft) and civil engineering (e.g., response mitigation of buildings during earthquakes). Wireless communication has been proposed as a communication medium for the sensors, actuators and controllers that make up the feedback control system. While wireless communication may dramatically reduce the costs associated with the manufacture of control systems, they simultaneously introduce a new set of technical challenges including power limitations, lower communication speeds and reduced system robustness. This project studies how the human cochlea and the auditory nervous system acquires, communicates and processes acoustic information with the aim of emulating its operational principles in wireless feedback control systems. The power-efficient and real-time processing architectures found in biological neural circuits promise to resolve the long-standing performance bottlenecks associated with wireless telemetry in feedback control applications. The impact this research would have on the US economy is enormous given the prevalence of feedback control systems used daily by society. In addition, the project introduces innovative engineering coursework in bio-inspired engineering and engages middle-school students from underrepresented groups to motivate them to pursue STEM careers. The overarching goal of the research effort is to apply the methods of neural pulse train coding from the field of neurobiology to resolve the power consumption, speed, and robustness challenges associated with wireless communication in networked feedback control systems. The team will study the sensory neural principles of the mammalian cochlea and will use these principles as the functional basis of an energy-efficient wireless sensor that modulates sensor data into digital pulse train signals communicated directly to the radio frequency spectrum using a code division multiple access (CDMA) communication scheme. The project will also study common neural motifs to serve as functional blocks for the mapping of feedback control laws into complex neural circuits that process the spike train signals generated by the cochlea-inspired wireless sensor nodes. The result will be a biologically inspired wireless feedback control system that implements a compressive sensing strategy at the sensing front-end and processes spike train signals in real-time on the system back-end using neural circuits trained to implement desired feedback control laws. The intellectual significance of the work is that it breaks new ground by adopting the operational principles of biological neural circuits to formalize a new design paradigm for engineered feedback control systems.