Evolutionary design of fault-tolerant analog control for a piezoelectric pipe-crawling robot

In this paper, a genetic algorithm (GA) is used to design faulttolerant analog controllers for a piezoelectric micro-robot. Firstorder and second-order functions are developed to model the robot's piezoelectric actuators, and the GA is used to evolve closed-loop controllers for both models. The GA is first used to assist in traditional PID design and is later used to synthesize variable topology analog controllers. Through the use of a compact circuit representation, runtimes are minimized and controllers are synthesized with minimum population sizes and components. Fault-tolerance is built into the fitness function to facilitate the design of controllers robust to both actuator failure and component failure. The GA is successfully used to design synthetic controllers and to optimize a traditional PID design. This research shows the advantages of GA assisted design when applied to robot-control problems. Categories and Subject Descriptors B.8.1 [Hardware]: Reliability, Testing, a...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: GECCO
• Authors: Geoffrey A. Hollinger, David A. Gwaltney
• Keywords: Analog Controllers, GECCO 2006, Optimization, Piezoelectric Actuators, Traditional Pid Design