Automatic generation of nonlinear optimal control laws for broom balancing using evolutionary programming

The paper explores the use of mutatian operators with evolutionary programming (EP) to automatically generate time optimal “bang-bang” type control laws for the three dimensional broom balancing (inverted pendulum) problem. EP produces a time optimal nonlinear control strategy that takes the state variables as input and determines the direction of the “bang-bang” force to be applied. Preliminary results indicate that the control laws generated are capable of generalizing over previously unseen input states and compare well with nonlinear control laws that were generated using other evolutionary computation methods