Instinct-driven dynamic hardware reconfiguration: evolutionary algorithm optimized compression for autonomous sensory agents

Advancement in miniaturization of autonomous sensory agents can play a profound role in many applications such as the exploration of unknown environments, however, due to their miniature size, power limitations poses a severe challenge. In this paper, and inspired from biological instinctive behaviour, we introduce an instinct-driven dynamic hardware reconfiguration design scheme using evolutionary algorithms on behaviour trees. Moreover, this scheme is projected on an application scenario of autonomous sensory agents exploring an inaccessible dynamic environment. In this scenario, agent's compression behaviour -introduced as an instinct- is critical due to the limited energy available on the agents. This emphasises the role of optimization of agents resources through dynamic hardware reconfiguration. In that regard, the presented approach is demonstrated using two compression techniques: Zero-order hold and Wavelet compression. Behavioural and hardware-based power models of these techniques, integrated with behaviour trees (BT), are implemented to facilitate off-line learning of the optimum on-line behaviour, thus, facilitating dynamic reconfiguration of agents hardware.