Abstract
Although many researches have been done in the field of distributed autonomous systems, most of them discuss only the theory aspect with simulation but no experimental results. Among the systems with real experimental results, the works which take into consideration the system dynamics are still rare. In this paper, a distributed autonomous mechatronics system is proposed as a test bed for studying autonomous decentralized control. The proposed system consists multiple actuators loop-connected into a wheel shape. The system has significant characteristics of strong internal constraints and thus requires strong co-operation to control. In order to design an initial controller as the basis for future studies, Genetic Programming and Genetic Algorithms were employed to directly search for suboptimal torque generating functions. A real experimental system has been constructed and experimental results have confirmed the performance of the controllers obtained by the genetic methods.
