Synthesis of Control Algorithms for Autonomous Vehicles through Automatic Programming

In this paper, an automatic approach to designing a control system is presented. An algorithm for the control of a simulated race car is evolved and shown to be capable of driving millions of randomly generated tracks at high speeds without ever driving off the road. We also show that our automatically generated non-linear control algorithm significantly outperforms a linear model. Although the application considered is that of controlling a racing car, our methodology is likely to be generally applicable to most automatic control problems given suitable software simulators for the systems in question.