Artificial intelligence-controlled pole balancing using an Arduino board

Abstract

Automation Process (AP) is an important issue in the current digitized world and, in general, represents an increase in the quality of productivity when compared with manual control. Balance is a natural human capacity as it relates to complex operations and intelligence. Balance Control presents an extra challenge in automation processes, due to the many variables that may be involved. This work presents a physical balancing pole where a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent can explore the environment, sense its position through accelerometers, and wirelessly communicate and eventually learns by itself how to keep the pole balanced under noise disturbance. The agent uses RL principles to explore and learn new positions and corrections that lead toward more significant rewards in terms of pole equilibrium. By using a Q-matrix, the agent explores future conditions and acquires policy information that makes it possible to maintain stability. An Arduino microcontroller processes all training and testing. With the help of sensors, servo motors, wireless communications, and artificial intelligence, components merge into a system that consistently recovers equilibrium under random position changes. The obtained results prove that through RL, an agent can learn by itself to use generic sensors, actuators and solve balancing problems even under the limitations that a microcontroller presents.