Abstract— We introduce a sustainable system design for image processing applications by prototyping a Sobel edge-detection approach suitable for harsh operating environments. The resulting Reconfigurable Adaptive Redundancy System (RARS) is demonstrated on a Xilinx Virtex-4 device with the JTAG port used to monitor the system status using an autonomous supervision process to maintain high system throughput. Evolutionary refurbishment of faulty modules by means of intrinsic Genetic Algorithms (GAs) is also utilized when the system performance declines below a pre-defined threshold. Finally, dynamic partial reconfiguration is utilized to reduce the bitstream transfer time and thus improve the performance of the GA. This results in an autonomous sustainable approach which supplies useful throughput at a degraded rate even during the repair period. Index Terms—Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration, Intrinsic Bitstream Evolution, Edge Detection, Fault Handling I. INTRODUCTION Increasing the self-reliance of deployed systems would dramatically increase their dependability and domains of applicability. For example, complex monitoring and recording devices able to operate autonomously for long periods of time without external repair are essential for reducing the risk involved in space missions, deep-sea missions, manned and unmanned avionic missions, and deployments to remote or difficult terrestrial areas. A military or commercial satellite that cannot recover from a hardware failure becomes orbiting space junk, or must be replaced incurring great economic cost, unavailability, and societal impact. By contrast, a sustainable self-aware satellite would offer increased dependability and an extended lifetime. Traditional reliability techniques often rely on the concept of redundancy. Redundancy is the addition of resources, time or information beyond what is actually needed for normal system operation, in order to maintain functionality and performance when faults occur. The tradeoff between overhead and reliability in redundant systems has been the focal point of This research was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under contract #W31P4Q-08-C-0168. many research efforts in the past decades [1]. Consequently, many redundancy schemes have emerged to support different reliability requirements. Some influential ones include: Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR): is a passive hardware redundancy scheme that masks faults as they occur without the need to isolate faulty parts. TMR consists of three functionally identical modules performing the same task in tandem, and a voter that outputs the majority vote of the three modules [2]. Even if one module fails, the other two can still overweight its erroneous output and maintain a correct overall TMR output. The voter in this case is assumed to be a golden element of ideal or very high reliability. Duplex Configuration: consists of two functional modules and a discrepancy detector that keeps track of any discrepancy between the outputs of the modules. The system must tolerate a period of degraded operation until the fault is isolated and recovered (by other means). Stand-by sparing: One module is driving the system operation while the others are hot spares in an idle state but ready to be called upon into action. Cold spares, on the other hand, are kept shutdown and thus do not consume power, but it will incur some delay upon before being able to replace the faulty module. The tradeoff in all of these fault-handling systems is between increased system dependability and the overhead associated with maintaining redundant parts. For instance, duplex systems maintain one redundant element, but cannot mask faults on the fly. Adding one module to duplex configuration makes it capable of masking faults via TMR techniques, at the expense of extra area, power, and cost. Among all the previously described configurations, it is a matter of overhead versus gain so the mission-level analysis is needed to determine appropriate tradeoffs. In addition, mission-critical applications are impacted by many parameters, and some of them can be only decided at runtime. For example, an edge detector circuit occupies extreme importance when it is operating on a critical video stream like a moving object in a surveillance recording, in these cases it is usually required to quickly mask any faults that might occur, because any loss of detection capabilities is intolerable in such cases and can affect the overall mission objectives. On the other hand, if the very same edge detector is operating on a still scene in the surveillance recording, it might be possible for the system to tolerate some degradation in the output because Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration Approach to the Design of Sustainable Edge Detectors Ronald F. DeMara, Jooheung Lee Brian Stensrud and Michael Quist Rawad Al-Haddad, Rashad Oreifej, Rizwan Ashraf Soar Technology, Inc. University of Central Florida 3361 Rouse Road, Suite #175 Orlando, FL 32816-2362 Orlando, FL 32817 demara@mail.ucf.edu stensrud@soartech.com