Optimal Control of Unknown Nonlinear System From Inputoutput Data

Optimal control designers usually require a plant model to design a controller. The problem is the controller\u27s performance heavily depends on the accuracy of the plant model. However, in many situations, it is very time-consuming to implement the system identification procedure and an accurate structure of a plant model is very difficult to obtain. On the other hand, neuro-fuzzy models with product inference engine, singleton fuzzifier, center average defuzzifier, and Gaussian membership functions can be easily trained by many well-established learning algorithms based on given input-output data pairs. Therefore, this kind of model is used in the current optimal controller design. Two approaches of designing optimal controllers of unknown nonlinear systems based on neuro-fuzzy models are presented in the thesis. The first approach first utilizes neuro-fuzzy models to approximate the unknown nonlinear systems, and then the feasible-direction algorithm is used to achieve the numerical solution of the Euler-Lagrange equations of the formulated optimal control problem. This algorithm uses the steepest descent to find the search direction and then apply a one-dimensional search routine to find the best step length. Finally several nonlinear optimal control problems are simulated and the results show that the performance of the proposed approach is quite similar to that of optimal control to the system represented by an explicit mathematical model. However, due to the limitation of the feasible-direction algorithm, this method cannot be applied to highly nonlinear and dimensional plants. Therefore, another approach that can overcome these drawbacks is proposed. This method utilizes Takagi-Sugeno (TS) fuzzy models to design the optimal controller. TS fuzzy models are first derived from the direct linearization of the neuro-fuzzy models, which is close to the local linearization of the nonlinear dynamic systems. The operating points are chosen so that the TS fuzzy model is a good approximation of the neuro-fuzzy model. Based on the TS fuzzy model, the optimal control is implemented for a nonlinear two-link flexible robot and a rigid asymmetric spacecraft, thus providing the possibility of implementing the well-established optimal control method on unknown nonlinear dynamic systems

Robotics 2010

Without a doubt, robotics has made an incredible progress over the last decades. The vision of developing, designing and creating technical systems that help humans to achieve hard and complex tasks, has intelligently led to an incredible variety of solutions. There are barely technical fields that could exhibit more interdisciplinary interconnections like robotics. This fact is generated by highly complex challenges imposed by robotic systems, especially the requirement on intelligent and autonomous operation. This book tries to give an insight into the evolutionary process that takes place in robotics. It provides articles covering a wide range of this exciting area. The progress of technical challenges and concepts may illuminate the relationship between developments that seem to be completely different at first sight. The robotics remains an exciting scientific and engineering field. The community looks optimistically ahead and also looks forward for the future challenges and new development

Advances in Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a very dynamic area in terms of theory and application. This book brings together many different aspects of the current research on several fields associated to RL which has been growing rapidly, producing a wide variety of learning algorithms for different applications. Based on 24 Chapters, it covers a very broad variety of topics in RL and their application in autonomous systems. A set of chapters in this book provide a general overview of RL while other chapters focus mostly on the applications of RL paradigms: Game Theory, Multi-Agent Theory, Robotic, Networking Technologies, Vehicular Navigation, Medicine and Industrial Logistic

Navigational Path Analysis of Mobile Robot in Various Environments

This dissertation describes work in the area of an autonomous mobile robot. The objective is navigation of mobile robot in a real world dynamic environment avoiding structured and unstructured obstacles either they are static or dynamic. The shapes and position of obstacles are not known to robot prior to navigation. The mobile robot has sensory recognition of specific objects in the environments. This sensory-information provides local information of robots immediate surroundings to its controllers. The information is dealt intelligently by the robot to reach the global objective (the target). Navigational paths as well as time taken during navigation by the mobile robot can be expressed as an optimisation problem and thus can be analyzed and solved using AI techniques. The optimisation of path as well as time taken is based on the kinematic stability and the intelligence of the robot controller. A successful way of structuring the navigation task deals with the issues of individual behaviour design and action coordination of the behaviours. The navigation objective is addressed using fuzzy logic, neural network, adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system and different other AI technique.The research also addresses distributed autonomous systems using multiple robot