NEUROACTIVE STEROIDS FOR RESEARCH ON ALCOHOLISM

Not Available Animals must integrate large amounts of sensor information to orient movement towards goals and away from threats, often in milliseconds, to survive. Identical directives are faced by autonomous munitions; particularly rapid assimilation of surroundings and instantaneous target seeking. Nature, through evolution and natural selection, has optimized this behavior. In particular, insects initiate actions reflexively in situations where no time for detailed information processing or planned decision making is possible. Possession of similar capabilities would increase the performance, speed and accuracy of all weapons systems. Orbital Research proposes developing an insect-like set of artificial reflexes - BioSeek - to enable autonomous munitions instant targeting and replanning capability. BioSeek will unionize two innovative biologically inspired technologies. The first, the Biologically Inspired Autonomous Vehicle Escape Reflex Tactic, or BioAVERT is a.neural map of an insect's motion reflex. The second, the Mulitresolution Automated Path Planning Evolutionary Routing or MAPPER genetic algorithm, is an automated path planner mimicking natural selection. The BioSeek targeting reflex will invert BiOAVERT for instantaneous targeting for autonomous munitions by implementing MAPPER to generate base sets of targeting patterns, then feeding them to BioAVERT to instantly elicit appropriate targeting patterns while still avoiding collisions with obstacles other than the target.