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机械(如飞机的飞行控制)和土木工程(如建筑物在地震中的响应缓解)中的动态系统的性能。无线通信已被提出作为构成反馈控制系统的传感器、执行器和控制器之间的通信媒介。虽然无线通信可以极大地降低与控制系统制造相关的成本，但它们同时也带来了一系列新的技术挑战，包括功率限制、通信速度降低和系统健壮性降低。该项目研究了人类耳蜗和听觉神经系统是如何获取、交流和处理声音信息的，目的是在无线反馈控制系统中模拟其工作原理。生物神经电路中的高能效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。鉴于社会日常使用的反馈控制系统非常普遍，这项研究对美国经济的影响是巨大的。此外，该项目引入了生物启发工程方面的创新工程课程，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职业生涯。研究的总体目标是应用神经生物学领域的神经脉冲序列编码方法来解决网络反馈控制系统中与无线通信相关的功耗、速度和健壮性挑战。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，该传感器使用码分多址(CDMA)通信方案将传感器数据调制为数字脉冲串信号，直接传输到射频频谱。该项目还将研究常见的神经基元，作为将反馈控制规律映射到复杂神经电路的功能块，这些复杂神经电路处理由耳蜗启发的无线传感器节点产生的尖峰训练信号。其结果将是一个受生物启发的无线反馈控制系统，该系统在传感前端实施压缩感知策略，并使用训练成实施所需反馈控制律的神经电路在系统后端实时处理尖峰训练信号。这项工作的智力意义在于，它通过采用生物神经电路的工作原理来开辟新的领域，正式化为工程反馈控制系统的新设计范式。

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.