Control of autonomous robots using fuzzy logic controllers tuned by genetic algorithms

Truly autonomous vehicles will require both projective planning and reactive components in order to perform robustly. Projective components are needed for long term planning and re-planning where explicit reasoning about future states is required. Reactive components allow the system to always have some action available in real time, and themselves can exhibit robust behaviour, but lack the ability to explicitly reason about future states over a long time period. The paper emphasises creating the projective component but also offer a simple solution for reactive component. A genetic algorithm implements the projective component, which designs automatically a fuzzy logic controller by modifying the position of controller membership functions and the commands given to the robot. For the reactive component, a simple solution was adopted so that if the robot sensors detect new obstacles, the robot will try to move to a previous position.