Cooperative Coordination Method of Neural Network Controller Module for Autonomous Mobile Robot Navigation

This paper is concerned with designing a neural network based navigator that is optimized in a user-defined sense for a mobile robot using ultrasonic sensors to travel to a goal position safely and efficiently without any prior map of the environment. The neural network has a dynamically reconfigurable structure that not only can optimize the weights but also the input sensory connectivity in order to meet any user-defined objective. Therefore, in this research, we can select an optimal subset of sensory inputs that results in the best performance related to both navigation and structural complexity. Further, this research uses the manually trained initial population and the modular neural network to alleviate ...