Welcome

The Biologically Inspired Design-for-Resilience (BID4R) Lab uses a combination of design methodology, systems engineering, and complex system modeling to examine biologically inspired approaches to increase systems, systems of systems, and multi-agent system resilience. Impact is highly valued in the BID4R Lab. It may include sharing outcomes at conferences, in workshops, during internships, in professional development courses, in undergraduate courses, and through outreach. BID4R lab is part of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) department of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and is led by Dr. Bryan Watson.

Our mission is to:

  1. Develop ERAU graduates as expert engineers, thinkers, and leaders.
  2. Develop approaches to increase resilience, thus protecting people, industries, and communities from disruption and harm.
  3. Expand the use of biologically inspired design as a paradigm for exploring new, novel engineering challenges.

The BID4R Lab focuses its research on three pillars:

I. Identifying and Applying Biological Inspiration: How can we improve our understanding of biological strategies to increase resilience as well as transfer these strategies to address engineering challenges?

  • Ongoing collaboration with ERAU Prescott focuses on measuring bed-bug response to stimuli. Bed-bugs demonstrate distributed collaboration approaches which can be used to inspire UAV and Swarm algorithms.
  • Ant colony response to invasive fungi is being modeled and simulated as an
    approach to minimize the damage from intruders infiltrating swarm operations
    (2023 ERAU Faculty Innovative Research in Science and Technology (FIRST)
    Program).
  • Applying ecosystem functional roles to system-of-system design has been shown
    to increase resilience to unexpected faults [1].


II. Design Theory: What are best practices for design-by-analogy and biologically inspired design?

  • A recent study presented at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers presented an approach of using functional decomposition to derive design principles to increase multi-agent system resilience through analysis of Eusocial Insects [2].
  • A review of 660 current examples of biologically inspired design provides insight into the uses, purposes, and inspiration for biologically inspired design in academia, practice, and the public perception. Biologically Inspired Design is most often use in the physical domain, inspired by a part of nature that is commonly well-known, uses a structural strategy to solve an issue, improves an innovation’s reliability, and impacts the use phase [3].

III. Resilience Engineering: How can we improve our understanding of resilience as a property of systems as well as support current resilience engineering efforts?

  • Work has focused on deriving and developing a new metric to measure resilience for connected systems (or systems of systems) [4].

For more information, please check the document below:

BID4R Lab Description Summary

If you are interested in working on a research project, share some ideas, or need any information regarding our lab, feel free to contact us!

[1] B. C. Watson, S. Malone, M. J. Weissburg, and B. Bras, “Adding a Detrital Actor to Increase System of System Resilience: A Case Study Test of a Biologically Inspired Design Heuristic to Guide Sociotechnical Network Evolution,” J. Mech. Des., vol. 142, no. 12, pp. 1–13, 2020, doi: 10.1115/1.4048579.

[2] I. V Hernandez, B. C. Watson, M. Weissburg, and B. Bras, “Learning from Insects to Increase Multi-Agent System Resilience: Functional Decomposition and Transfer to Support Biologically Inspired Design,” in Proceedings of the ASME 2020 IDETC and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, 2021, pp. 1–12.

[3] M. G. Jastrzembski, B. C. Watson, M. J. Weissburg, and B. Bras, “Assessing the state of biologically inspired design from three perspectives: academic, public, and practitioners,” Bioinspiration and Biomimetics, vol. 18, no. 4, 2023, doi: 10.1088/1748-3190/accb31.

[4] B. C. Watson, A. Chowdhry, M. J. Weissburg, and B. Bras, “A New Resilience Metric to Compare System of Systems Architecture,” IEEE Syst. J., vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 2056–2067, 2021, doi: 10.1109/JSYST.2021.3062444