It is perhaps not easy to become conscious of the obvious that surrounds us. Every moment we witness the marvels of the ultimate engineer that is Nature: such a diversity of living beings that are all remarkably adaptable and robust. With the current technological advance Nature is becoming increasingly interesting for design engineers for it offers a wealth of inspiration.

With the advent of space exploration, mankind has stepped into a new era, where mechanisms endowing living beings with robustness and power to replicate and adapt are desirable to be borrowed from Nature and transplanted into electronic devices. The POE model offers a representation of the efforts made in computer sciences and engineering in order to efficiently implement mechanisms already tested by Nature. A key, long-term research project, aiming at bridging the gap between the worlds of biology and electronics is Embryonics (from embryonic electronics), started by the Logic System Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, in order to explore the potential of applying ontogenetic processes to build novel computing systems.

At the “Politehnica” University in Timisoara we focus on expanding the Embryonics project as part of the ongoing effort towards a PhD thesis and aim on joining to the collective effort made on the emerging field of evolvable hardware, which has gained supporters around the world: USA, Japan, United Kingdom, Spain.

• Evolvable hardware
• Multiple-level self-testing and repairing
• Modular (cellular) architectures
• Component-based architectures
• Neural networks