Learning from the barn owl auditory system: A bio-inspired localization hardware architecture

Normally, research on evolutionary computation applies its algorithms to the solution or optimization of some technical or mathematical problems. But for some technical tasks, such as localization, nature seem to provides optimal solutions. This paper discusses how the barn owl auditory system can be conceptually realized on a digital system, such as a field programmable gate array. This adapted system yields a time resolution as small as 20 ps, even though it is clocked at only 85 MHz, which corresponds to a duty cycle of about 12 ns. The system achieves this result by copying the natural role model´s core principles, i.e., employing a large number of simple, slowly operating processing elements, which are all connected to two passive wires, which induce only a very small additional time delay; these properties are the result of a natural evolutionary process that has taken millions of years.