Intrinsic hardware evolution for the design and reconfiguration of analog speed controllers for a DC Motor

Evolvable hardware provides the capability to evolve analog circuits to produce amplifier and filter functions. Conventional analog controller designs employ these same functions. Analog controllers for the control of the shaft speed of a DC motor are evolved on an evolvable hardware platform utilizing a second generation field programmable transistor array (FPTA2). The performance of an evolved controller is compared to that of a conventional proportional-integral (PI) controller. It is shown that hardware evolution is able to create a compact design that provides good performance, while using considerably less functional electronic components than the conventional design. Additionally, the use of hardware evolution to provide fault tolerance by reconfiguring the design is explored. Experimental results are presented showing that significant recovery of capability can be made in the face of damaging induced faults.

[1]  J. K. Parker,et al.  Further consideration of an electromechanical thrust vector control actuator experiencing large magnitude collinear transient forces , 1997, Proceedings The Twenty-Ninth Southeastern Symposium on System Theory.

[2]  S. J. Flockton,et al.  Evolvable hardware systems using programmable analogue devices , 1998 .

[3]  Kais Atallah,et al.  Large electromechanical actuation systems for flight control surfaces , 1998 .

[4]  Jason D. Lohn,et al.  A circuit representation technique for automated circuit design , 1999, IEEE Trans. Evol. Comput..

[5]  S. C. Jensen,et al.  Flight test experience with an electromechanical actuator on the F-18 Systems Research Aircraft , 2000, 19th DASC. 19th Digital Avionics Systems Conference. Proceedings (Cat. No.00CH37126).

[6]  Adrian Stoica,et al.  Fault-tolerant evolvable hardware using field-programmable transistor arrays , 2000, IEEE Trans. Reliab..

[7]  John R. Koza,et al.  Automatic synthesis of both the control law and parameters for a controller for a three-lag plant with five-second delay using genetic programming and simulation techniques , 2000, Proceedings of the 2000 American Control Conference. ACC (IEEE Cat. No.00CH36334).

[8]  Marley M. B. R. Vellasco,et al.  Evolvable hardware: on the automatic synthesis of analog control systems , 2000, 2000 IEEE Aerospace Conference. Proceedings (Cat. No.00TH8484).

[9]  Adrian Stoica,et al.  Progress and challenges in building evolvable devices , 2001, Proceedings Third NASA/DoD Workshop on Evolvable Hardware. EH-2001.

[10]  Adrian Stoica,et al.  An Evolvable Hardware Platform Based on DSP and FPTA , 2002, GECCO Late Breaking Papers.

[11]  Johannes Schemmel,et al.  Intrinsic evolution of quasi DC solutions for transistor level analog electronic circuits using a CMOS FPTA chip , 2002, Proceedings 2002 NASA/DoD Conference on Evolvable Hardware.

[12]  John R. Koza,et al.  Automatic synthesis using genetic programming of an improved general-purpose controller for industrially representative plants , 2002, Proceedings 2002 NASA/DoD Conference on Evolvable Hardware.

[13]  Vu Duong,et al.  Evolving circuits in seconds: experiments with a stand-alone board-level evolvable system , 2002, Proceedings 2002 NASA/DoD Conference on Evolvable Hardware.

[14]  Andy M. Tyrrell,et al.  Evolved fault tolerance in evolvable hardware , 2002, Proceedings of the 2002 Congress on Evolutionary Computation. CEC'02 (Cat. No.02TH8600).

[15]  Ronald F. DeMara,et al.  A Genetic Representation for Evolutionary Fault Recovery in Virtex FPGAs , 2003, ICES.