Collaborative Control of Multiple Robots Using Genetic Fuzzy Systems Approach

This paper introduces a decentralized approach of collaborative control between multiple robots. A dynamic problem is considered to illustrate the effectiveness of this approach. The objective of this problem is to control three robots that are connected to a ball through elastic strings to bring the ball to a pre-defined target position. Since there is no communication between the robots, each robot does not know how the other robots are going to react at any instant. The only information available to the robots are the current and target positions of the ball. Genetic Fuzzy Systems (GFSs) are used to develop controllers for individual robots to tackle this problem. The nonlinearity of fuzzy logic systems coupled with the search capability of Genetic Algorithm (GA) provides an invaluable tool to design controllers for such tasks. The system is first trained through a set of scenarios and then applied to an extensive test set to test the effectiveness of the approach.