Genetic Algorithms in Applications. Edited by Rustem Popa

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Genetic Algorithms in Applications

Edited by Rustem Popa

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Genetic Algorithms (GAs) are one of several techniques in the family of Evolutionary Algorithms - algorithms that search for solutions to optimization problems by

“evolving” better and better solutions. Genetic Algorithms have been applied in science, engineering, business and social sciences. This book consists of 16 chapters organized

into five sections. The first section deals with some applications in automatic control, the second section contains several applications in scheduling of resources, and the third section introduces some applications in electrical and electronics engineering.

The next section illustrates some examples of character recognition and multi- criteria classification, and the last one deals with trading systems. These evolutionary techniques may be useful to engineers and scientists in various fields of specialization,

who need some optimization techniques in their work and who may be using Genetic Algorithms in their applications for the first time. These applications may be useful to many other people who are getting familiar with the subject of Genetic Algorithms.

ISBN 978-953-51-0400-1

Genetic Algorithms in Applications

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GENETIC ALGORITHMS IN APPLICATIONS

Edited by Rustem Popa

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GENETIC ALGORITHMS IN APPLICATIONS

Edited by Rustem Popa

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Edited by Rustem Popa Contributors

Osama Yaseen Mahmood Al-Rawi, Goran Stojanovski, Mile Stankovski, Tomio Kurokawa, Hanan Aljuaid, Kurban Ubul, Andy Adler, Mamatjan Yasin, Qibo Peng, Limin Jia, Shusuke Narieda, Chien-Min Ou, Wen-Jyi Hwang, Germano Lambert-Torres, Camila Salomon, Maurilio Coutinho, Luiz Eduardo Borges Da Silva, Carlos Henrique Valério De Moraes, Alexandre Rasi Aoki, Abdel-Aal Mantawy, Dario Benvenuti, Ghasem Karimi, Omid Jahanian, Massimiliano Kaucic, Seiji Aoyagi, Amaury Brasil Filho, Plácido Rogerio Pinheiro

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Notice

Statements and opinions expressed in the chapters are these of the individual contributors and not necessarily those of the editors or publisher. No responsibility is accepted for the accuracy of information contained in the published chapters. The publisher assumes no responsibility for any damage or injury to persons or property arising out of the use of any materials, instructions, methods or ideas contained in the book.

First published in Croatia, 2012 by INTECH d.o.o.

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Genetic Algorithms in Applications Edited by Rustem Popa

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Meet the editor

Rustem Popa was born in Galati, Romania, in 1960. He received his masters degree from the Politehnica Univer- sity, Bucharest, Romania, in 1984. In 1999, he obtained his PhD degree from the Dunarea de Jos University, Galati, Romania. He worked as a design engineer and then as a scientific researcher at the Research and Design Institute for Shipbuilding in Galati. Since 1990 he has been with the Dunarea de Jos University in Galaþi and, since 2002, he has been an associate professor at the Department of Electronics and Telecom- munications. Dr Popa has more than 20 years’ teaching experience in the area of digital electronics, medical electronics and soft computing. He is the author and co-author of four books and over 50 journal and confer- ence papers. His research interests include computational intelligence, evolvable hardware, digital signal processing and medical electronics. He was editor-in-chief of the Annals of Dunarea de Jos University of Galati, fascicle III – ISSN 1221-454X in 2006 and 2007. He was also an IPC member and reviewer for many international conferences.

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A Genetic Algorithm starts with a population of possible solutions for the desired application. The best ones are selected to become parents and then, using genetic operators like crossover and mutation, offspring are generated. The new solutions are evaluated and added to the population and low-quality solutions are deleted from the population to make room for new solutions. The members of the population tend to get better with the increasing number of generations. When the algorithm is halted, the best member of the existing population is taken as the solution to the problem.

Genetic Algorithms have been applied in science, engineering, business and social sciences. A number of scientists have already solved many real-life problems using Genetic Algorithms. This book consists of 16 chapters organized in five sections.

The first section contains five chapters in the field of automatic control. Chapter 1 presents a laser tracking system for measuring a robot arm’s tip with high accuracy using a GA to optimize the number of measurement points. Chapter 2 presents a model predictive controller that uses GAs for the optimization of cost function in a simulation example of industrial furnace control. Chapter 3 describes a design method to determine PID controller parameters using GAs. Finite-thrust trajectory optimization using a combination between Gauss Pseudospectral Method and a GA is proposed in Chapter 4. Chapter 5 describes the optimization of an above-knee prosthesis physical parameters using GAs.

The next section of the book deals with scheduling of resources and contains two chapters in this field. Chapter 6 analyzes the Unit Commitment Problem, that is the problem of selecting electrical power systems to be in service during a scheduling period and determining the length of that period. Chapter 7 deals with several typical applications of GAs to solving optimization problems arising from railway management information system design, transportation resources allocation and traffic control for railway operation.

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The third section contains four chapters in the field of electrical and electronics engineering. Chapter 8 proposes a new VLSI architecture which is able to implement Memetic Algorithms (which can be viewed as the hybrid GAs) in hardware. Chapter 9 describes a distributed estimation technique that uses GA to optimize frequency and time division multiple access which is employed in several wireless sensor networks systems. Chapter 10 deals with the problem of direction of arrival estimation through a uniform circular array interferometer. GAs have been compared with other optimization tools and they have confirmed a more robust behavior when low computing power is available. The last chapter in this section, Chapter 11, presents the GA application in three functions commonly executed in power control centers: power flow, system restoration and unit commitment.

The fourth section of the book has three chapters that illustrate two applications of character recognition and a multi-criteria classification. Chapter 12 applies a GA for offline handwriting character recognition. Chapter 13 deals with writer identification by integrating GAs with several other known techniques from pattern recognition.

Chapter 14 proposes an early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease by combining a multi- criteria classification model with a GA engine, with better results than those offered by other existing methods.

Finally, the last section contains two chapters dealing with trading systems. Chapter 15 discusses the development of artificial trading systems for portfolio optimization using a multi-modular evolutionary heuristic capable of dealing efficiently with the zero investment strategy. Chapter 16 provides some insight into overfitting in the environment of trading in market and proposes a GA application for trading in market toward a stable profitable method.

These evolutionary techniques may be useful to engineers and scientists from various fields of specialization who need some optimization techniques in their work and who are using Genetic Algorithms for the first time in their applications. I hope that these applications will be useful to many other people who may be familiarizing themselves with the subject of Genetic Algorithms.

Rustem Popa Department of Electronics and Telecommunications

“Dunarea de Jos” University of Galati Romania

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Part 1 GAs in Automatic Control

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1 Selection of Optimal Measuring Points Using Genetic Algorithm in the Process to Calibrate Robot Kinematic Parameters

Seiji Aoyagi

Kansai University, Japan

1. Introduction

At present state, almost the industrial robot tasks are performed by the teaching playback method, in which the robot repeats positioning its joint angles, which are taught manually in advance using a teaching pendant, etc. This method is based on comparatively high repeatability of a robot arm. The problem here is that the laborious and time-consuming online manual teaching is inevitable whenever the specification of the product is changed. It is desirable to teach the task easily and quickly to the robot manipulator when the production line and the production goods are changed.

Considering these circumstances, the offline teaching based on the high positioning accuracy of the robot arm is desired to take the place of the online manual teaching (Mooring et al., 1991). In the offline teaching, the joint angles to achieve the given Cartesian position of the arm’s tip are calculated using a kinematic model of the robot arm. However, a nominal geometrically model according to a specification sheet does not include the errors arising in manufacturing or assembly. Moreover, it also does not include the non-geometric errors, such as gear transmission errors, gear backlashes, arm compliance, etc., which are difficult to geometrically consider in the kinematic model. Under this situation, the joint angles obtained based on the non-accurate nominal kinematic model cannot realize the desired arm’s tip position satisfactorily, making the offline teaching unfeasible.

Therefore, some method of calibrating precisely the geometric and non-geometric parameters in a kinematic model is required, in which the three dimensional (3-D) absolute position referring to a world coordinate system should be measured (Mooring & Padavala, 1989; Whitney et al., 1986; Judd & Knasinski, 1990; Stone, 1987; Komai & Aoyagi, 2007). The parameters are obtained so as that the errors between the measured positions and the predicted positions based on the kinematic model are minimized by a computer calculation using a nonlinear least square method.

In this study, a laser tracking system was employed for measuring the 3-D position. This system can measure the 3-D position with high accuracy of several tens micrometer order (Koseki et al., 1998; Fujioka et al., 2001a; Fujioka et al., 2001b). As an arm to calibrate, an articulated robot with seven degrees of freedom (DOF) was employed. After the geometric

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1 Selection of Optimal Measuring Points Using Genetic Algorithm in the Process to Calibrate Robot Kinematic Parameters

Seiji Aoyagi

Kansai University, Japan

1. Introduction

At present state, almost the industrial robot tasks are performed by the teaching playback method, in which the robot repeats positioning its joint angles, which are taught manually in advance using a teaching pendant, etc. This method is based on comparatively high repeatability of a robot arm. The problem here is that the laborious and time-consuming online manual teaching is inevitable whenever the specification of the product is changed. It is desirable to teach the task easily and quickly to the robot manipulator when the production line and the production goods are changed.

Considering these circumstances, the offline teaching based on the high positioning accuracy of the robot arm is desired to take the place of the online manual teaching (Mooring et al., 1991). In the offline teaching, the joint angles to achieve the given Cartesian position of the arm’s tip are calculated using a kinematic model of the robot arm. However, a nominal geometrically model according to a specification sheet does not include the errors arising in manufacturing or assembly. Moreover, it also does not include the non-geometric errors, such as gear transmission errors, gear backlashes, arm compliance, etc., which are difficult to geometrically consider in the kinematic model. Under this situation, the joint angles obtained based on the non-accurate nominal kinematic model cannot realize the desired arm’s tip position satisfactorily, making the offline teaching unfeasible.

Therefore, some method of calibrating precisely the geometric and non-geometric parameters in a kinematic model is required, in which the three dimensional (3-D) absolute position referring to a world coordinate system should be measured (Mooring & Padavala, 1989; Whitney et al., 1986; Judd & Knasinski, 1990; Stone, 1987; Komai & Aoyagi, 2007). The parameters are obtained so as that the errors between the measured positions and the predicted positions based on the kinematic model are minimized by a computer calculation using a nonlinear least square method.

In this study, a laser tracking system was employed for measuring the 3-D position. This system can measure the 3-D position with high accuracy of several tens micrometer order (Koseki et al., 1998; Fujioka et al., 2001a; Fujioka et al., 2001b). As an arm to calibrate, an articulated robot with seven degrees of freedom (DOF) was employed. After the geometric

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parameters were calibrated, the residual errors caused by non-geometric parameters were further reduced by using neural networks (abbreviated to NN hereinafter), which is one of the originalities of this study.

Several researches have used NN for robot calibration. For example, it was used for interpolating the relationship between joint angles and their errors due to joint compliance (Jang et al., 2001). Two joints liable to suffer from gravitational torques were dealt with, and the interpolated relationships were finally incorporated into the forward kinematic model.

So the role of NN was supplemental for modeling non-geometric errors. It is reported that the relationship between Cartesian coordinates and positioning errors arising there was interpolated using NN (Maekawa, 1995). Joint angles themselves in forward kinematic model, however, were not compensated, and experimental result was limited to a relative (not absolute) measurement using a calibration block in a rather narrow space. Compared with these researches, in the method proposed in this study, the joint angles in the forward kinematic model are precisely compensated using NN so that the robot accuracy would be fairly improved in a comparatively wide area in the robot work space. As instrumentation for non-contact absolute coordinate measurement in 3-D wide space, which is inevitable for calibration of the robot model and estimation of the robot accuracy, a laser tracking system is employed in this study.

To speed up the calibration process, the smaller number of measuring points is preferable, while maintaining the satisfactory accuracy. As for a parallel mechanism, methods of reducing the measurement cost were reported (Tanaka et al., 2005; Imoto et al., 2008; Daney et al., 2005). As one of the methods of selecting optimal measurement poses, the possibility of using genetic algorithm (GA) was introduced (Daney et al., 2005): however, it was still on the idea stage, i.e., it was not experimentally applied to a practical parallel mechanism. As for a serial type articulated robot, it was reported that the sensitivities of parameters affecting on the accuracy are desired to be averaged, i.e., not varied widely, for achieving the good accuracy (Borm & Menq, 1991; Ishii et al., 1988). As the index of showing the extent how the sensitivities are averaged, observability index (OI) was introduced in (Borm &

Menq, 1991), and the relationship between OI and realized accuracy was experimentally investigated: however, a method of selecting optimal measurement points to maximize OI under the limitation of point number has not been investigated in detail, especially for an articulated type robot having more than 6-DOF. In this paper, optimal spatial selection of measuring points realizing the largest OI was investigated using GA, and it was practically applied to a 7-DOF robot, which is also the originality of this study.

2. Measurement apparatus featuring laser tracking system 2.1 Robot arm and position measurement system

An articulated robot with 7-DOF (Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, PA10) was employed as a calibration object. A laser tracking system (Leica Co. Ltd., SMART310) was used as a position measuring instrument. The outline of experimental setup using these apparatuses is shown in Fig. 1

The basic measuring principle of laser tracking system is based on that proposed by Lau (Lau, 1986). A laser beam is emitted and reflected by a tracking mirror, which is installed in the reference point and is rotated around two axes. Then, this beam is projected to a retro-

reflector called Cat’s-eye, which is fixed at the robot arm’s tip as a target (see Figs. 2 and 3).

The Cat's-eye consists of two hemispheres of glasses, which have the same center and have different radiuses. A laser beam is reflected by the Cat’s-eye and returns to the tracking mirror, following the same path as the incidence.

Fig. 1. Experimental setup for measuring position of robot arm’s tip

Fig. 2. Cat’s-eye

Encoder

DD Motor

Position Detector Beam Splitter Single beam interferometer

Encoder DD Motor

X

Y φZ Lθ

X,Y,Z : Cartesian coordinate system

L, θ, φ : Polar coordinate system Tracking Mirror

Reflector (Cat's-eye)

Fig. 3. Principle of measurement of SMART310

The horizontal and azimuth angle information of laser direction is obtained by optical encoders, which are attached to the two axes of the tracking mirror. The distance information of laser path is obtained by an interferometer. Using the measured angles and distance, the position of the center of Cat’s-eye, i.e., the position of robot arm’s tip, can be

PA10 Cat’s-eye Laser tracking system

φ75 mm Hemispheres of glasses

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