A basal ganglia inspired soft switching approach to the motion control of a car-like autonomous vehicle

Citation

Yang E, Hussain A & Gurney K (2013) A basal ganglia inspired soft switching approach to the motion control of a car-like autonomous vehicle. In: Liu D, Alippi C, Zhao D & Hussain A (eds.) Advances in Brain Inspired Cognitive Systems: 6th International Conference, BICS 2013, Beijing, China, June 9-11, 2013. Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Sci, 7888. 6th International Conference on Brain Inspired Cognitive Systems, BICS 2013, Beijing, China, 09.06.2013-11.06.2013. Berlin Heidelberg: Springer, pp. 245-254. http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-38786-9_28#; https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38786-9_28

Abstract
This paper presents a new brain-inspired, switching control approach for a car-like autonomous vehicle using a basal ganglia (BG) model as an action selection mechanism. The problem domain has challenging nonholonomic and state constraints which imply no single stabilizing controller solution is possible by time-invariant smooth state feedback. To allow the BG make the correct controller selection from a family of candidate motion controllers, a fuzzy logic-based salience model using reference and tracking error only is developed, and applied in a soft switching control mechanism. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for motion tracking control, we show effective control for a circular trajectory tracking application. The performance and advantages of the proposed fuzzy salience model and the BG-based soft switching control scheme against a traditional single control method are compared.

Keywords
Brain-inspired computing; basal ganglia; cognitive computation; autonomous vehicles; motion control; soft switching; multiple controller systems; action selection; fuzzy logic