%0 Journal Article
%T Reaction Diffusion and Chemotaxis for Decentralized Gathering on FPGAs
%A Bernard Girau
%A C¨¦sar Torres-Huitzil
%A Nikolaos Vlassopoulos
%A Jos¨¦ Hugo Barr¨®n-Zambrano
%J International Journal of Reconfigurable Computing
%D 2009
%I Hindawi Publishing Corporation
%R 10.1155/2009/639249
%X We consider here the feasibility of gathering multiple computational resources by means of decentralized and simple local rules. We study such decentralized gathering by means of a stochastic model inspired from biology: the aggregation of the Dictyostelium discoideum cellular slime mold. The environment transmits information according to a reaction-diffusion mechanism and the agents move by following excitation fronts. Despite its simplicity this model exhibits interesting properties of self-organization and robustness to obstacles. We first describe the FPGA implementation of the environment alone, to perform large scale and rapid simulations of the complex dynamics of this reaction-diffusion model. Then we describe the FPGA implementation of the environment together with the agents, to study the major challenges that must be solved when designing a fast embedded implementation of the decentralized gathering model. We analyze the results according to the different goals of these hardware implementations.
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijrc/2009/639249/