Ant colony optimization-based bio-inspired hardware: Survey and prospect

Bio-inspired hardware (BHW) refers to hardware that can change its architecture and behaviour dynamically and autonomously by interacting with its environment, and ant colony optimization is a meta-heuristic algorithm for the approximate solution of combinatorial optimization problems that has been inspired by the foraging behaviour of real ant colonies. In this paper, we take a broad survey on the recent progresses of ant colony optimization-based BHW, which includes ant colony optimization-based fuzzy controller, ant colony optimization-based hardware for the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP), digital circuits, digital infinite impulse-response (IIR) filters, hardware-oriented ant colony optimization with look-up table and hardware/software partition. Some important issues of the challenges of ant colony optimization-based BHW are also presented. Online realization, robustness, generalization, disaster problems, theoretical analysis, implementation, swarm robotics, applications and hybrid approaches are eight key challenging issues for the ant colony optimization-based BHW.