Artificial homeostatic temperature regulation via bio-inspired feedback mechanisms

Abstract

Homeostasis comprises one of the main features of living organisms that enables their robust functioning by adapting to environmental changes. In particular, thermoregulation, as an instance of homeostatic behavior, allows mammals to maintain stable internal temperature with tightly controlled self-regulation independent of external temperatures. This is made by a proper reaction of the thermoeffectors (like skin blood vessels, brown adipose tissue (BAT), etc.) on a wide range of temperature perturbations that reflect themselves in the thermosensitive neurons’ activity. This activity is being delivered to the respective actuation points and translated into thermoeffectors’ actions, which bring the temperature of the organism to the desired level, called a set-point. However, it is still an open question whether these mechanisms can be implemented in an analog electronic device: both on a system theoretical and a hardware level. In this paper, we transfer this control loop into a real electric circuit by designing an analog electronic device for temperature regulation that works following bio-inspired principles. In particular, we construct a simplified single-effector regulation system and show how spiking trains of thermosensitive artificial neurons can be processed to realize an efficient feedback mechanism for the stabilization of the a priori unknown but system-inherent set-point. We also demonstrate that particular values of the set-point and its stability properties result from the interplay between the feedback control gain and activity patterns of thermosensitive artificial neurons, for which, on the one hand, the neuronal interconnections are generally not necessary. On the other hand, we show that such connections can be beneficial for the set-point regulation and hypothesize that the synaptic plasticity in real thermosensitive neuronal ensembles can play a role of an additional control layer empowering the robustness of thermoregulation. The electronic realization of temperature regulation proposed in this paper might be of interest for neuromorphic circuits which are bioinspired by taking the basal principle of homeostasis on board. In this way, a fundamental building block of life would be transferred to electronics and become a milestone for the future of neuromorphic engineering.