Neural Network For Function Approximation Research Articles (Page 1)

This paper presents a robust proportional derivative adaptive nonsingular finite-time synergetic tracking control (PDAFS) for a parallel Delta robot system. First, a finite-time synergetic controller combined with a proportional derivative (PD) control is constructed based on an object-oriented model to fulfill the robust tracking control of the robot. Then, an adaptive radial basis function approximation neural network (RBF) is designed to compensate for the effects of uncertainty parameters and external disturbances. Second, a second-order sliding mode (SOSM) differentiator is implemented to reduce the chattering noises due to the low-resolution encoders. Third, the stability theorems of the proposed control scheme are provided, where the Lyapunov stability theory is used to prove the theorems. Then, simulations of the helix trajectory tracking and the pick-and-place task are demonstrated on the Delta robot to validate the advantages of the proposed control scheme. Based on the advances, an implementing control system of the proposed controller is performed to improve the Delta robot’s performance in the experiments.

Energy efficiency is a key to reduced carbon footprint, savings on energy bills, and sustainability for future generations. For instance, in hot climate countries such as Qatar, buildings are high energy consumers due to air conditioning that resulted from high temperatures and humidity. Optimizing the building energy management system will reduce unnecessary energy consumptions, improve indoor environmental conditions, maximize building occupant’s comfort, and limit building greenhouse gas emissions. However, lowering energy consumption cannot be done despite the occupants’ comfort. Solutions must take into account these tradeoffs. Conventional Building Energy Management methods suffer from a high dimensional and complex control environment. In recent years, the Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithm, applying neural networks for function approximation, shows promising results in handling such complex problems. In this work, a Deep Reinforcement Learning agent is proposed for controlling and optimizing a school building’s energy consumption. It is designed to search for optimal policies to minimize energy consumption, maintain thermal comfort, and reduce indoor contaminant levels in a challenging 21-zone environment. First, the agent is trained with the baseline in a supervised learning framework. After cloning the baseline strategy, the agent learns with proximal policy optimization in an actor-critic framework. The performance is evaluated on a school model simulated environment considering thermal comfort, CO2 levels, and energy consumption. The proposed methodology can achieve a 21% reduction in energy consumption, a 44% better thermal comfort, and healthier CO2 concentrations over a one-year simulation, with reduced training time thanks to the integration of the behavior cloning learning technique.

Catalysed diesel particulate filters (DPF) have been described as multifunctional reactor systems. Integration of selective catalytic reduction (SCR) functionality in the DPF creates an SCR-in-DPF system that achieves nitrous oxides (NOx) treatment along with particulate matter (PM) collection. The physical and chemical aspects of the integrated SCR-filter complicate system modelling. The goal of this work is to develop low-complexity model of the SCR-filter system which retains high fidelity. A high-fidelity model of the SCR-coated filter has been developed and validated. The performance of the model was described in a previous paper. Model complexity reduction is attempted in this paper. The objective is to achieve simulation times that can support the deployment of the model for online system control in an engine control unit. Two approaches were taken for the SCR-coated filter model order reduction (MOR): a “grey-box” approach via proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) and a “black box” approach via artificial neural network (ANN) function approximation. The POD method is shown to deliver a significant MOR while maintaining a high degree of fidelity but with less than 5% improvement in simulation time. The ANN method delivers a substantial MOR with reduction of three orders of magnitude in simulation time. The accuracy of the ANN model is satisfactory with good generalisation to new test data but noticeably inferior to the POD method.

Detecting and adapting to catastrophic failures in robotic systems requires a robot to learn its new dynamics quickly and safely to best accomplish its goals. To address this challenging problem, we propose probabilistically-safe, online learning techniques to infer the altered dynamics of a robot at the moment a failure (e.g., physical damage) occurs. We combine model predictive control and active learning within a chance-constrained optimization framework to safely and efficiently learn the new plant model of the robot. We leverage a neural network for function approximation in learning the latent dynamics of the robot under failure conditions. Our framework generalizes to various damage conditions while being computationally light-weight to advance real-time deployment. We empirically validate within a virtual environment that we can regain control of a severely damaged aircraft in seconds and require only 0.1 seconds to find safe, information-rich trajectories, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches.

A meta optimisation analysis of particle swarm optimisation velocity update equations for watershed management learning

Genetic Algorithm (GA) is a metaheuristic used in solving combinatorial optimization problems. Inspired by evolutionary biology, GA uses selection, crossover, and mutation operators to efficiently traverse the solution search space. This paper proposes nature inspired fine-tuning to the crossover operator using the untapped idea of Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). mtDNA is a small subset of the overall DNA. It differentiates itself by inheriting entirely from the female, while the rest of the DNA is inherited equally from both parents. This unique characteristic of mtDNA can be an effective mechanism to identify members with similar genes and restrict crossover between them. It can reduce the rate of dilution of diversity and result in delayed convergence. In addition, we scale the well-known Island Model, where instances of GA are run independently and population members exchanged periodically, to a Continental Model. In this model, multiple web services are executed with each web service running an island model. We applied the concept of mtDNA in solving Traveling Salesman Problem and to train Neural Network for function approximation. Our implementation tests show that leveraging these new concepts of mtDNA and Continental Model results in relative improvement of the optimization quality of GA.

The soft computing algorithms are being nowadays used for various multi input multi output complicated non linear control applications. This paper presented the development and implementation of back propagation of multilayer perceptron architecture developed in FPGA using VHDL. The usage of the FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) for neural network implementation provides flexibility in programmable systems. For the neural network based instrument prototype in real time application. The conventional specific VLSI neural chip design suffers the limitation in time and cost. With low precision artificial neural network design, FPGA have higher speed and smaller size for real time application than the VLSI design. The challenges are finding an architecture that minimizes the hardware cost, maximizing the performance, accuracy. The goal of this work is to realize the hardware implementation of neural network using FPGA. Digital system architecture is presented using Very High Speed Integrated Circuits Hardware Description Language (VHDL)and is implemented in FPGA chip. MATLAB ANN programming and tools are used for training the ANN. The trained weights are stored in different RAM, and is implemented in FPGA. The design was tested on a FPGA demo board. Keywords- Backpropagation, field programmable gate array (FPGA) hardware implementation, multilayer perceptron, pressure sensor, Xilinx FPGA.

Neurons are highly interconnected with each other and are communicating via sending and receiving electrochemical signals, thus composing sophisticated network of interconnected and communicating neurons. This paper discuss the structure of the neural network function approximator and the time series forecasting with neural network, the results could help us to obtain the optimal solutions to higher complexity of the problem.

Output feedback adaptive neural control is investigated for non-affine non-linear systems with zero dynamics using implicit function theorem, mean value theorem and neural network (NN) parametrisation by exploiting the explicit Lipschitz property of radial basis function NNs for function approximation. The control approach developed is based on non-separation principle design. A new dynamic gain observer is introduced to estimate the unmeasurable states of the system. The observer gain and the neural controller are simultaneously tuned according to output tracking error. With the universal approximation property of NN and the simultaneous parametrisation both for the NN approximation and the controller, restrictive conditions, such as Lipschitz assumption, strictly positive realness condition and contracting assumption are not required. Semi-globally uniformly ultimate boundedness for the steady-state and transient performance is guaranteed, and simulation results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

In the magnetic flux leakage (MFL) method of nondestructive testing commonly used to inspect ferromagnetic materials, a crucial problem is signal inversion, wherein the defect profiles must be recovered from measured signals. This paper proposes a neural-network-based inversion algorithm to solve the problem. Neural networks (radial-basis function and wavelet-basis function) are first trained to approximate the mapping from the signal to the defect space. The trained networks are then used iteratively in the algorithm to estimate the profile, given the measurement signal. The paper presents the results of applying the algorithm to simulated MFL data.

Nonlinear PI control of uncertain systems: an alternative to parameter adaptation

Backpropagation neural network has been applied successfully to solving uncertain problems in many fields. However, unsolved drawbacks still exist such as the problems of local minimum, slow convergence speed, and the determination of initial weights and the number of processing elements. In this paper, we introduce a single-layer orthogonal neural network (ONN) that is developed based on orthogonal functions. Since the processing elements are orthogonal to one another and there is no local minimum of the error function, the orthogonal neural network is able to avoid the above problems. Among the five existing orthogonal functions, Legendre polynomials and Chebyshev polynomials of the first kind have the properties of recursion and completeness. They are the most suitable to generate the neural network. Some typical examples are given to show their performance in function approximation. The results show that ONN has excellent convergence performance. Moreover, ONN is capable of approximating the mathematic model of backpropagation neural network. Therefore, it should be able to be applied to various applications that backpropagation neural network is suitable to solve. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

A multilayer neural-network (NN) controller is designed to deliver a desired tracking performance for the control of a class of unknown nonlinear systems in discrete time where the system nonlinearities do not satisfy a matching condition. Using the Lyapunov approach, the uniform ultimate boundedness of the tracking error and the NN weight estimates are shown by using a novel weight updates. Further, a rigorous procedure is provided from this analysis to select the NN controller parameters. The resulting structure consists of several NN function approximation inner loops and an outer proportional derivative tracking loop. Simulation results are then carried out to justify the theoretical conclusions. The net result is the design and development of an NN controller for strict-feedback class of nonlinear discrete-time systems.

Neural networks must be constructed and validated with strong empirical dependence, which is difficult under conditions of sparse data. The paper examines the most common methods of neural network validation along with several general validation methods from the statistical resampling literature, as applied to function approximation networks with small sample sizes. It is shown that an increase in computation, necessary for the statistical resampling methods, produces networks that perform better than those constructed in the traditional manner. The statistical resampling methods also result in lower variance of validation, however some of the methods are biased in estimating network error.

On topology, size and generalization of non-linear feed-forward neural networks

This paper presents a new single-layer neural network which is based on orthogonal functions. This neural network is developed to avoid the problems of traditional feedforward neural networks such as the determination of initial weights and the numbers of layers and processing elements. The desired output accuracy determines the required number of processing elements. Because weights are unique, the training of the neural network converges rapidly. An experiment in approximating typical continuous and discrete functions is given. The results show that the neural network has excellent performance in convergence time and approximation error.