Evolutionary Robot Wall-Following Control Using Type-2 Fuzzy Controller With Species-DE-Activated Continuous ACO.

This paper proposes evolutionary wall-following control of a mobile robot using an interval type-2 fuzzy controller (IT2FC) with species-differential-evolution-activated continuous ant colony optimization (SDE-CACO). Both the position and speed of a mobile robot are controlled by using two IT2FCs to improve noise resistance ability. A new cost function is defined to accurately evaluate the wall-following performance of an evolutionary IT2FC. A two-stage training approach is proposed that learns a position IT2FC followed by a speed IT2FC to optimize both the wall-following accuracy and the moving speed. The proposed learning approach avoids the time consuming task of the exhaustive collection of supervised input–output training pairs. All fuzzy rules are generated online using a clustering-based approach during the evolutionary learning process. All of the free parameters in an online-generated IT2FC are optimized using SDE-CACO, in which an SDE mutation operation is incorporated within a continuous ACO to improve its explorative ability. The proposed SDE-CACO is compared with various population-based optimization algorithms to demonstrate its efficiency and effectiveness in the wall-following control problem. This study also includes experiments that demonstrate wall-following control utilizing a real mobile robot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]