Bus Automata For Intelligent Robots And Computer Vision
Jerome Rothstein · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1988
Bus automata (BA's) are arrays of automata, each controlling a module of a global interconnection network, an automaton and its module constituting a cell. Connecting modules permits cells to become effectively nearest neighbors even when widely separated. This facilitates parallelism in computation far in excess of that allowed by the "bucket-brigade" communication bottleneck of traditional cellular automata (CA's). Distributed information storage via local automaton states permits complex parallel data processing for rapid pattern recognition, language parsing and other distributed computation at systolic array rates. Global BA architecture can be entirely changed in the time to make one cell state transition. The BA is thus a neural model (cells correspond to neurons) with network plasticity attractive for brain models. Planar (chip) BA's admitting optical input (phototransistors) become powerful retinal models. The distributed input pattern is optically fed directly to distributed local memory, ready for distributed processing, both "retinally" and cooperatively with other BA chips ("brain"). This composite BA can compute control signals for output organs, and sensory inputs other than visual can be utilized similarly. In the BA retina is essentially brain, as in mammals (retina and brain are embryologically the same). The BA can also model opto-motor response (frogs, insects) or sonar response (dolphins, bats), and is proposed as the model of choice for the brains of future intelligent robots and for computer eyes with local parallel image processing capability. Multidimensional formal languages are introduced, corresponding to BA's and patterns the way generative grammars correspond to sequential machines, and applied to fractals and their recognition by BA's.