Cross-Entropy Optimization for Scaling Factors of a Fuzzy Controller: A See-and-Avoid Approach for Unmanned Aerial Systems

The Cross-Entropy (CE) is an efficient method for the estimation of rare-event probabilities and combinatorial optimization. This work presents a novel approach of the CE for optimization of a Soft-Computing controller. A Fuzzy controller was designed to command an unmanned aerial system (UAS) for avoiding collision task. The only sensor used to accomplish this task was a forward camera. The CE is used to reach a near-optimal controller by modifying the scaling factors of the controller inputs. The optimization was realized using the ROS-Gazebo simulation system. In order to evaluate the optimization a big amount of tests were carried out with a real quadcopter. M. A. Olivares-Mendez (B) · P. Campoy · I. Mellado-Bataller CAR Centro de Automática y Robótica, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain e-mail: [email protected] URL: http://www.vision4uav.eu/?q=miguel/personal L. Mejias Australian Research Centre for Aerospace Automation (ARCAA), Queensland University of Technology, GPO Box 2434, Brisbane, QLD 4001, Australia e-mail: [email protected]