Optimal Control of an Inverted Pendulum by Genetic Programming: Practical Aspects

During the past several years, numerous papers and applications designing control systems with genetic algorithms (GAs) have been written. Many of these studies end when the simulated behaviour of the system with the controller is satisfactory. They suppose that the final stage of application of the controller to the real system will be similar to the one from the traditional design.This paper explains the conclusions of the real application of one such publication: the control of an inverted pendulum using a well-known variant of GAs: genetic programming (GP). The aim of this paper is to study the existence of possible special problems in the application stage of genetic-designed controllers. As will be seen, the application stage is more difficult for GAs than for traditional methods, and more knowledge is needed about the system.