Exploring Natural Strategies for Bio-Inspired Fault Adaptive Systems Design

Abstract

Fault adaptive design seeks to find the principles and properties that enable robustness, reliability and resilience to implement those features into engineering products. In nature, this characteristic of adaptability is the fundamental trait that enables survival. Utilizing adaption strategy is a new area of research exploration for bio-inspired design. In this paper we introduce a tool for bio-inspired design for fault adaption. Further we discuss insights from using this tool in a undergraduate design experiment. The goal of the tool is to assist designers to develop fault adaptive behaviors in engineering systems using nature as inspiration. This tool is organized as a binary tree where branches that represent the specific details of how an organism achieves an adaptive behavior or characteristic. Results from an initial study indicate, for the specific challenge of designing fault adaption into a system, a strategy based method can provide designers with innovative analogies and help provide the details needed to bridge the gap between analogy and engineering implementation.