Evolvable hardware for spacecraft autonomy

Evolvable hardware is a recently proposed technology in which reconfigurable hardware under the control of an evolutionary (genetic) algorithm can automatically self-reconfigure into configurations with the desired behavior. This would not only enable the on-demand generation of new functionality when needed, but this could provide increased fault-tolerance, as the hardware would be able to cope with faults by reassigning function cells to take over the faulty ones. This paper describes ongoing work at JPL, focusing on applications to onboard image processing.