Neural Control System for Autonomous Vehicles

Neural networks have been used in a number of robotic applications (Das & Kar, 2006; Fierro & Lewis, 1998), including both manipulators and mobile robots. A typical approach is to use neural networks for nonlinear system modelling, including for instance the learning of forward and inverse models of a plant, noise cancellation, and other forms of nonlinear control (Fierro & Lewis, 1998). An alternative approach is to solve a particular problem by designing a specialized neural network architecture and/or learning rule (Sutton & Barto, 1981). It is clear that biological brains, though exhibiting a certain degree of homogeneity, rely on many specialized circuits designed to solve particular problems. We are interested in understanding how animals are able to solve complex problems such as learning to navigate in an unknown environment, with the aim of applying what is learned of biology to the control of robots (Chang & Gaudiano, 1998; Martínez-Marín, 2007; Montes-González, Santos-Reyes & RíosFigueroa, 2006). In particular, this article presents a neural architecture that makes possible the integration of a kinematical adaptive neuro-controller for trajectory tracking and an obstacle avoidance adaptive neuro-controller for nonholonomic mobile robots. The kinematical adaptive neuro-controller is a real-time, unsupervised neural network that learns to control a nonholonomic mobile robot in a nonstationary environment, which is termed Self-Organization Direction Mapping Network (SODMN), and combines associative learning and Vector Associative Map (VAM) learning to generate transformations between spatial and velocity coordinates (García-Córdova, Guerrero-González & García-Marín, 2007). The transformations are learned in an unsupervised training phase, during which the robot moves as a result of randomly selected wheel velocities. The obstacle avoidance adaptive neurocontroller is a neural network that learns to control avoidance behaviours in a mobile robot based on a form of animal learning known as operant conditioning. Learning, which requires no supervision, takes place as the robot moves around a cluttered environment with obstacles. The neural network requires no knowledge of the geometry of the robot or of the quality, number, or configuration of the robot’s sensors. The efficacy of the proposed neural architecture is tested experimentally by a differentially driven mobile robot.