KEYNOTE ADDRESS BIONICS - NEW FRONTIERS OF TECHNOLOGY THROUGH John E. Keto Wright Air Development Division BIONICS - DEFINITION AND SCOPE What is Bionics? Bionics is a new word for an interest that has intrigued man for many generations. You have heard of it previously in terms of automata, robots, or self organizing systems. Norbert Weiner added new viewpoints, ideas, and understanding of closely related considerations in his text on Cybernetics (ref. 1). Perhaps the real significance of the new term at this time is in providing a challenge to the development of a major advance in the understanding of the functions, characteristics, and phenomena that we find in the living world and the application of this know-how toward new devices and techniques for the machine world. But a more subtle, yet definite and far reaching payoff will be the cross products of the cross-fertilized interests and disciplines involved. By definition, Bionics is broad in scope; it is equally broad in intent and interest. Its significance depends upon understanding the total scope of our total interest. In very simple language, we are trying to crosscouple the know-how that we have achieved, or are achieving, concerning living prototypes toward the solution of engineering problems. In the language of Dr. Warren Weaver (ref. 2), these are problems of "organized complexity, dealing with phenomena, systems or communities made up of large numbers of intimately related variables, complex in relationship, to which simple mathematics will not apply; problems to which the probabilistic and statistical approach is not adequate; problems about which we have to establish and achieve new logic and new areas of mathematics. There has been some tendency to consider Bionics primarily in the sense of the neural processes and the relationship to possible neural analogs. This applies particularly to such functions as information handling, storage, retrieval, computation and decision making. Although these are obviously important functions of interest to Bionics, there are many more. We must also concern ourselves with the sensor functions, the capability of seeing, hearing, feeling, touching, smelling, and the like that you find in the animal world; the sensitivities and sensibilities of perception and recognition; the servo-control functions, their gross character and fine order preciseness; and finally, self-organizing or self-adaptive capabilities. A living prototype grows; you fabricate a device or a machine, and by some mechanism of fabrication or growth it develops its own capabilities. It learns, it adapts to its environment. Consider the signal conversion processes that take place so neatly and so precisely in the animal world-signal conversion techniques that can add much to our knowledge about transAs ducers. There are many more but time and space limit my enumerations. a last function, consider the matter of growth itself. Besides the importance of understanding this function in its own right, new techniques and processes of fabrication and production can very well develop from such understanding. We "grow" solid state materials for transistors and solid state devices. Can we go even beyond that? This is a good question. Perhaps we should be studying more intently the use of organic materials that have inherent growth capabilities for our basic solid state functions. TECHNOLOGICAL PAYOFFS OF BIONICS Bionics has a potentially significant payoff to many technologies. There is a tendency, again, because many of the biological functions involve charged particle phenomena and the fundamental characteristics and properties of charged particles, to think of bionics in close relationship to electronics. In fact, one can play a word game arriving at the term "bionics" by starting with bio-medical electronics, dropping medical to obtain bioelectronics, and finally shortening to bionics. However, bionics relationships with technology go much further than electronics: For example, aeronautics, the ability of the animal world to fly, the early interest of man in terms of simulating the capabilities of the bird; guidance and control-we mentioned earlier the servo-control functions of the living prototypes; navigation, the ability of the homing pigeon to home, birds to find their destination in migration, fish to locate their specific spawning grounds; marine engineering, the question of how the sea mammals and fish communicate, navigate, congregate is of key interest; communications engineering, the ability of man himself to communicate with fellow man possesses many capabilities far in excess of our devices art; and finally, bionics by virtue of cross fertilized interests and disciplines will provide major contributions in the medical, bio-medical, and biological fields. Deep at the roots of basic understanding of living mechanisms and the process of synthesizing their analogs are fundamental chemistry and properties of matter and materials. Chemical and materials technologies will therefore benefit from these endeavors. As a final consideration and as pointed out earlier, to treat adequately with the complex problems involved will require advances in new logic and related mathematics. These then are the technologies that have a close relationship to bionics and stand to gain in large measure from such efforts: Electronics Aeronautics Guidance and Control Navigation Communication Marine Medical Biological Chemical Materials Mathematics Air Force and Military WHY INTEREST IN BIONICS? Let us look briefly at the question of why we are interested in Bionics. Is this just a new catch term that is going to be another passing fad? I think not. We have tremendous problems today that have a possible solution or advanced capability arriving out of our research in the area of Bionics. Let's look at the military side. These are some of the particular interests of the Air Force. First of all, we have tremendous data processing problems resulting from all the electronic systems used to couple together our military bases, our military weapons system--communications, navigation, command and control, surveillance and warning and decision making--a tremendous amount of information that has to be processed. When you consider the time constants of the over-all system that we are trying to achieve, the quick reaction capabilities that are necessary, and the confidence required of final decision making, critical importance is placed on advances in these electronic nerve networks, their equipments and devices. Our weapon systems have become highly complex placing major importance on data processing functions inherent to the required and effective functioning of such weapon systems. The next interest pertains to reliability, illustrated by our interest in the communications satellite project. It is no longer satisfactory to accept 100 to 200 hours mean time to failure for our equipment. In a year's time you accumulate some 9,000 hours, so we must be thinking in terms of at least 9,000 to a desired 50,000 hours mean time to failure. We will not get there by extrapolating our present approaches. We must develop entirely new logic and new approaches to achieve this. When you consider the fundamental reliability capabilities in the animal world, you have some clues as to possible approaches. Today's and tomorrow's military system involves a very close man-machine relationship highlighted by the short time constants and quick reactions required as mentioned before. Advanced performance demands self-adaptive systems and an extremely close coupling of man and machine. Through knowledge of living prototypes, perhaps we can evolve new logic pertaining to this relationship. Military equipment and weapon systems are plagued with major problems of size, weight and operative power requirements. These pressures increase on an exponential basis. For instance, consider the growth in complexity of the aircraft weapon system. The B-17 which became operational in the early 1940's required 2,000 electronic parts total for all of the functions that were electronic in kind or used electronics partially. The B-52 which became operational in 1955 required 50,000 electronic parts total, and the B-58 which is just becoming operational in 1960 used 97,000 electronic parts in its make-up. The problems of available space, weight and input power requirements are obvious. Bionics has a tremendous potential payoff in this area when you appreciate the extreme compactness, very low comparative weight and power requirements of living prototypes. Still further down the road are the possible gains in fabrication and production techniques already mentioned. Humanitarian On the other side of the coin, there will be many payoffs humanitarian in kind improving man's general welfare. Prosthetic devices to assist the crippled; aids to the blind to permit them to perform in a more normal fashion; means for restoring man's capabilities that deteriorate with age or due to disease--hearing, seeing and others. As outlined earlier, there will be regenerative benefits to an improved medical and biological understanding of living prototypes. Through the cross-fertilized interests will develop a better understanding of the living world and ways and means of dealing with its ills and curing diseases such as cancer to provide longer life and improved health. Finally, bionics will advance the general welfare of man--a better standard of living through advanced ability to mechanize the industrial processes by which he earns his living and an improved state of well-being through recreational payoffs. Where We Stand THE CHALLENGE OF UNDERSTANDING THE LIVING WORLD We have had an interest in bionics for a long time. Man has been attempting to understand the living world for many, many years. Although much progress has been made, many questions of long interest concerning the living world remain essentially unsolved. We can highlight this with examples of research areas of long standing, such as the basic study of the process of photosynthesis, the luminosity of the firefly, the reproductive processes--how a sunflower develops from a seed and reproduces its seed. Then there are the animal sensitivities, the sense of smell of the dog, the homing instinct of the homing pigeons, the abilities of living things to sense with a selectivity and sensitivity conditions and objects of their environment that far exceed like capabilities of our most advanced devices. Understanding as to how has defied our probing for all these many years. Relative Progress of Man's Understanding of the Physical World vs. that of the Living World We have advanced far in our knowledge and know-how of the physical world, but we have not made corresponding advances concerning the living world. Why? First of all, on the physical side, we can generally isolate the problem and deal with a relatively small number of variables. The variables are related by fairly simple and exact mathematics. Physical phenomena are more capable of quantitative attack and associated experimental investigations are less complicated. In the living world, to isolate the problem in or from its environment, to be able to instrument the phenomena to make relevant measurements is obviously complicated and difficult. Finally, as Dr. Weaver brought out in his analysis of "Science and Complexity" (ref. 2), we have learned to solve two types of problems: those of simple complexity where one deals with two, three or four variables; and those characterized by random phenomBut ena that can be dealt with on the basis of probability and statistics. we have problems of "organized complexity," those problems involving large |