RUI: Bio-Inspired Architectures Enabling Real-Time Feedback Control in Wireless Sensing and Actuating Networks

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The goal of this project is to use strategies found in biological sensory circuits to create practical wireless networked control systems for minimizing damage to buildings and other critical civil infrastructure during events such as hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes. Critical civil infrastructure, such as bridges and buildings, are highly vulnerable to extreme load scenarios, such as high winds or earthquakes. Failure of such structures can have a significantly negative impact on society, both through loss of productivity as well as potential loss of life. To guard against these failures during extreme events, the project will use integrated feedback control, in which distributed sensors detect building motion and wirelessly send measurements to one or more processing nodes, which then use that data to command strategically located actuators to generate counteracting forces. Practical wireless implementation of such systems may be difficult due data-overload on communication links and processing nodes, and by time delays of signals traveling over the wireless links. The goal of this project is to overcome these problems using data compression strategies and other advantageous adaptations found in sensory loops in the biological central nervous system. This project will be carried out at Hope College, a Primarily Undergraduate Institution, and will introduce Hope College students to cutting-edge research in structural engineering. Wireless feedback control systems are challenged by constraints such as computation inundation at nodes and communication latencies, which have to date limited real-time control capabilities and large-scale deployments on civil infrastructure. In contrast, biological sensory systems are able to robustly react and adapt to their environment in ways that outperform engineering systems. The goal for this project is to draw inspiration from these biological mechanisms and develop a bio-inspired sensing and actuating architecture that utilizes front-end signal processing and simplistic information integration so as to streamline communication and enable real-time control. This will be achieved by utilizing optimal control theory as well as iterative training techniques to develop synaptic weights between layers of sensing and actuating nodes. The project will also study the synaptic plasticity exhibited by biological neural networks and integrate this behavior into the bio-inspired control architecture. The result will be an adaptive, bio-inspired control architecture that will be capable of real-time feedback control which will alleviate the challenges experienced in traditional wireless control systems. This architecture will be validated in hardware on a small scale structure that is subject to seismic excitation. By demonstrating an alternative sensing and actuating paradigm based on principles employed by the biological nervous system, the project will remove the constraints of traditional Nyquist sampling on wireless sensor networks while still maintaining effective control capabilities. This will move the field in a vertical direction as it will reduce current challenges of communication latencies and computation inundation, thus enabling real-time feedback control using wireless telemetry.