Transference of Evolved Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Controllers to a Wheeled Mobile Robot

Author

Barlow, Gregory J. ; Mattos, Leonardo S. ; Grant, Edward ; Oh, Choong K.

Author_Institution

Center for Robotics and Intelligent Machines Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695; The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213; gjb@cmu.edu

fYear

2005

fDate

18-22 April 2005

Firstpage

2087

Lastpage

2092

Abstract

Transference of controllers evolved in simulation to real vehicles is an important issue in evolutionary robotics (ER). We have previously evolved autonomous navigation controllers for fixed wing UAV applications using multi-objective genetic programming (GP). Controllers were evolved to locate a radar source, navigate the UAV to the source efficiently using on-board sensor measurements, and circle around the emitter. We successfully tested an evolved UAV controller on a wheeled mobile robot. A passive sonar system on the robot was used in place of the radar sensor, and a speaker emitting a tone was used as the target in place of a radar. Using the evolved navigation controller, the mobile robot moved to the speaker and circled around it. The results from this experiment demonstrate that our evolved controllers are capable of transference to real vehicles. Future research will include testing the best evolved controllers by using them to fly real UAVs.

Keywords

Erbium; Genetic programming; Mobile robots; Passive radar; Remotely operated vehicles; Robot control; Robot sensing systems; Sonar navigation; Testing; Unmanned aerial vehicles;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Robotics and Automation, 2005. ICRA 2005. Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE International Conference on

Print_ISBN

0-7803-8914-X

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ROBOT.2005.1570421

Filename

1570421