Introduction
I have been working in the area of fault-tolerant design of digital systems since 1983.
Electronic devices and systems are omnipresent in today's "high tech" world. The dependency we
put on electronic devices and systems does however have its down side when they go wrong. Think
of the Arianne 5 rocket, or the computer problems with the London ambulance service a few years ago.
One way to increase our confidence in such systems is to add some form of redundancy to take
over when parts of a system go wrong - this is normally termed fault-tolerance. I have been
working on incorporating fault-tolerant software and hardware for real-time applications, such
as robotics, aerospace systems and automotive systems. An area we are currently interested in
is using inspiration from biological systems to design our electronic systems, enabling them
to evolve and learn in much the same way as a child does. One day such developments may lead
to driverless cars or even pilotless planes!
|
