Evolutionary Optimization of a Neural Network Controller for Car Racing Simulation

Galanopoulos, Damianos; Athanasiadis, Christos; Tefas, Anastasios

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-30448-4_19

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 6 publications

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“…There are also other controllers for TORCS based on expert systems [11], [12], artificial neural networks [13], [14], fuzzy expert systems [15], [16], and genetic programming [17], [18], however, their performances are not as competitive as those four controllers. This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited.…”

Section: B Existing Drivers For Torcsmentioning

confidence: 93%

Ahura: A Heuristic-Based Racer for the Open Racing Car Simulator

Bonyadi

Michalewicz

Nallaperuma

et al. 2017

IEEE Trans. Comput. Intell. AI Games

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Designing automatic drivers for car racing is an active field of research in the area of robotics and artificial intelligence. A controller called Ahura (A HeUristic-based RAcer) for The Open Racing Car Simulator (TORCS) is proposed in this paper. Ahura includes five modules, namely steer controller, speed controller, opponent manager, dynamic adjuster, and stuck handler. These modules have 23 parameters all together that are tuned using an evolutionary strategy for a particular car to ensure fast and safe drive on different tracks. These tuned parameters are further modified by the dynamic adjuster module during the run according to the width, friction, and dangerous zones of the track. The dynamic adjustment enables Ahura to decide on-the-fly based on the current situation, hence, it eliminates the need for prior knowledge about the characteristics of the track. The driving performance of Ahura is compared with other state-of-the-art controllers on 40 tracks when they drive identical cars. Our experiments indicate that Ahura performs significantly better than other controllers in terms of damage and completion time especially on complex tracks (road tracks). Also, experiments show that the overtaking strategy of Ahura is safer and more effective comparing to other controllers. All authors are with the Optimisation and

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