IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL INFORMATICS, VOL. 11, NO.

4, AUGUST 2015

915

A Taguchi-Based Heterogeneous Parallel

Metaheuristic ACO-PSO and Its FPGA Realization
to Optimal Polar-Space Locomotion Control of
Four-Wheeled Redundant Mobile Robots
Hsu-Chih Huang, Member, IEEE

AbstractThis paper presents an efficient Taguchi-based

heterogeneous parallel metaheuristic ant colony optimization
(ACO)-particle swarm optimization (PSO), called THPACOPSO,
and its field-programmable gate array (FPGA) realization to
optimal polar-space locomotion control of four-wheeled redundant mobile robots. This THPACOPSO consists of one slave
Taguchi-based ACO (TACO) and one slave Taguchi-based PSO
(TPSO) along with a master communication operator in one chip
using system-on-a-programmable chip (SoPC) methodology. This
approach takes the advantages of the Taguchi quality method,
ACO, PSO, parallel processing, and FPGA technique, thereby
obtaining better population diversity, avoiding premature convergence and keeping parallelism. Experimental results and comparative works are conducted to present effective optimization
and high accuracy of the proposed FPGA-based THPACOPSO
locomotion controller for four-wheeled Swedish redundant mobile
robots.
Index TermsField-programmable gate array (FPGA),
metaheuristic, redundant control, system-on-a-programmable
chip (SoPC).

I. I NTRODUCTION

ETAHEURISTIC algorithms are widely recognized as

one of the efficient and practical approaches for many
complex combinatorial optimization problems that are not
tractable by deterministic methods [1][4]. This is due to
the fact that most real-world optimizations are highly nonlinear and multimodal with various complex constraints. In this
rapidly growing field of metaheuristics research, ant colony
optimization (ACO) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) are
currently gaining popularity for their increasing applications in
solving engineering problems of diverse domains. They have
been widely applied to many aspects in real-world application and have shown great success by exploiting their strong
optimization ability [5][8].
In order to expedite the processing time and increase the
searching diversity in sequential algorithms, the parallel ACOs

Manuscript received September 15, 2014; revised March 13, 2015; accepted
May 18, 2015. Date of publication May 31, 2015; date of current version July
31, 2015. This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology,
Taiwan, under Grant MOST 103-2221-E-197-028. Paper no. TII-14-1031.
The author is with the Department of Electrical Engineering, National Ilan
University, Yilan 26047, Taiwan (e-mail: hc.jack.huang@gmail.com).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TII.2015.2440173

and parallel PSOs have been proposed to address the optimization problems in recent years [9][11]. Although the parallel or
distributed metaheuristics have been proven useful in solving
complex combinatorial problems, these individual algorithms
have their strengths and restrictions.
To date, there are several modified ACOs and PSOs proposed to improve the system performance [12][14]. However,
the control parameters in these parallel and hybrid metaheuristic researches are usually set by an inefficient trial-and-error
approach [9][14] and there has no attempt to develop a heterogeneous parallel metaheuristic algorithm using Taguchi quality
method. Moreover, these personal computer (PC)-based metaheuristic algorithms [9][14] suffer from their high cost, so
that they are not suitable for real-time embedded robotics
applications. These disadvantages of the conventional metaheuristic paradigms can be circumvented by using the heterogeneous parallel processing, Taguchi method, and system-ona-programmable chip (SoPC) hardware/software codesign in
field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chip.
Taguchi quality method is a statistical method developed by
Genichi Taguchi to improve the product quality and cost in
industrial design [15][17]. On the other hand, FPGA-based
metaheuristics is a new challenging field in computational
intelligence. This computing transition from general purpose
processors to embedded systems has been emerging as a
new paradigm in terms of time-to-market, cost, implementation flexibility, and long-term maintenance [18][21]. To the
authors best understanding, there has no attempt to designing
intelligent FPGA-based Taguchi-based heterogeneous parallel
metaheuristic ACO-PSO (THPACOPSO) optimal redundant
controllers for four-wheeled mobile robots.
Mobile robots with Swedish omnidirectional driving capability are superior to those with differential wheels in terms
of dexterity and locomotion mechanism [22][24]. The fourwheeled mobile robots are expected to have better effective
floor traction, even though at the expense of increased mechanical and control complexities. However, there exists a redundant
control problem because more than three wheels provide redundancy [22].
Mathematical modeling and control of redundant fourwheeled omnidirectional mobile robots have been investigated
by several researchers [25][28]. Overall, these studies applied
more complex mechanisms of the mobile robots to resolve the

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL INFORMATICS, VOL. 11, NO. 4, AUGUST 2015

Fig. 1. Architecture of the proposed metaheuristic THPACOPSO algorithm.

redundant problem in Cartesian space. These researches neither cope with the polar-space redundant control problem of
four-wheeled mobile robots, nor address the control parameter
optimization problem.
Polar-space locomotion controllers of mobile robots have
been proven superior to the Cartesian controllers in tracking
the special trajectories, such as Archimedes spiral, rose curves,
and Limacon of Pascal [29][33]. These trajectories are easily
described in polar coordinates, but they are more complex in
Cartesian space. The polar-space tracking problems for nonholonomic mobile robots have been investigated by several
researchers [29][31]. There have been few studies related to
holonomic three-wheeled polar-space omnidirectional mobile
robot control [32], [33], in which the control parameters are
obtained by a trial-and-error approach. However, to the authors
best understanding, the polar-space redundant control problem
of four-wheeled mobile robots remains open.
The objective of this paper is to develop a pragmatic
metaheuristic THPACOPSO to optimal polar-space locomotion control of four-wheeled redundant mobile robots
to achieve trajectory tracking. This paper is organized as
follows. In Section II, the THPACOPSO algorithm is proposed. Section III elaborates the FPGA realization to optimal polar-space THPACOPSO locomotion control of fourwheeled redundant mobile robots to achieve trajectory tracking.
Section IV conducts experimental results and comparative
works to show the performance and merit of the proposed
methods. Section V concludes this paper.
II. TAGUCHI -BASED H ETEROGENEOUS PARALLEL
M ETAHEURISTIC ACO-PSO
Fig. 1 presents the architecture of the proposed
THPACOPSO which is a parallel processing strategy using
both ACO and PSO with Taguchi-based control parameter
tuners. This THPACOPSO consists of one Taguchi-based
ACO (TACO) slave processor and one Taguchi-based PSO
(TPSO) processor along with a communication master operator. The independent TACO and TPSO works in parallel
for searching the optimal solutions more efficiently by using
parallel architecture and Taguchi orthogonal array method.
This heterogeneous parallel model is employed to not only circumvents the premature convergence problem in conventional

metaheuristics, but also expedite the computing in searching

optimal solutions.
In the proposed THPACOPSO, the two Taguchi-qualified
slave processors concurrently executed with one master processor that aims at sharing information about the TACO and
TPSO searching experiences. More precisely, the slave TACO
and TPSO processor independently evolve new generations in
parallel, and master processor is responsible for collecting and
evaluating all the best solutions in slave processors. The master
processor serves as a communication operator that is designed
to allow the two slave processors to share their best solutions.
As shown in Fig. 1, the searching spaces for both slaves
are independent, and the solutions evolve separately for a
certain number of generations, called communication step.
After the communication step, the master processor finds the
parallel global best (Gbest ), and then send it to each slave
processor. The worst solution in each slave processor is then
replaced by the received parallel global best (Gbest ). Compared
with conventional hybrid and parallel computing methods, this
THPACOPSO not only increases the searching diversity, but
also decreases the probability to get stuck into a local optimum. The heterogeneous distributed metaheurictic algorithm
employs more searching space and faster computing speed to
search for a global optimum in the optimization problems.
A. Taguchi-Based ACO
TACO is a standard ACO tuned with Taguchi quality method
using the orthogonal array and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)
techniques. Compared to conventional ACOs, this method has
fewer experiments to obtain optimal ACO parameters in solving
multiobjective optimization problems.
1) ACO for Solving Optimization Problems: The main idea
of ACO is to model an optimization problem as the search
for a minimum cost path in a graph consisting of nodes and
edges. Each ant constructs a solution by making a sequence
of local decisions which are guided by pheromone information
and some problem-dependent heuristic information [5], [6].
The solutions to optimization problems can be expressed in
terms of feasible paths on the ACO graph. The ACO aims at
finding the best path with minimum cost and its corresponding
optimal solution in a multiobjective optimization problem. If
ant k is currently located at node i, it selects the next node j
Nik , based on the transition probability

 [ij (t)] [ij ] ,

if j Nik
k
[il (t)] [il ]
lN k
(1)
ij (t) =
0, i if j
/ N k.
i

ij is the pheromone trails on edge (i, j), Nik is the set

of feasible nodes connected to node i, with respect to ant k.
and are positive constants. The heuristic information ij is
a problem-dependent function to be minimized, given by
ij =

1
dij

(2)

where dij is the cost between the nodes i and j. The pheromone
update rule is given by
ij (t + 1) = (1 )ij (t) + ij (t)

(3)

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TABLE I
ACO C ONTROL PARAMETERS AND THE L EVELS

with
ij (t) =

m


k ij (t)

(4)

k=1

where k ij (t) is the amount of pheromone deposited by ant

k on link (i, j) at time step t, m denotes the number of ants,
and 0 < < 1 is the pheromone decay parameter. k ij (t) is
given by
Q
,
if kth ant uses edge(i, j) in its tour
k
ij (t) = Lk
0,
otherwise

TABLE II
TAGUCHI L25 (56 ) O RTHOGONAL A RRAY

where Q is a positive constant and Lk is the tour cost of the

kth ant. This algorithm will terminate either when the maximum number of iteration is reached or an acceptable solution is
found.
2) ACO Tuned With Taguchi Method: This section is
devoted to developing a qualified ACO tuned with Taguchi
method; this computing method resolves the control parameter
optimization problem in the ACO algorithms.
Taguchi method is an experimental method that can reduce
the disturbance caused by randomness and can help determine the optimal parameters in the ACO. An orthogonal array
is a fractional factorial matrix that provides a balanced comparison of levels of parameters or factors. This approach can
provide an efficient way to obtain the optimal ACO parameters. SNR is used in Taguchi method to measure the quality of
each experiment in the orthogonal array. This paper adopts the
small-the-better characteristic and the SNR is given by
SNR = 10 log

Nt
1 
yi 2
Nt i=1

(5)

where Nt represents the number of repeated experiments and

yi is the loss function for the ith experiment.
With the orthogonal array and SNR, the control parameters
in ACO can be properly set to obtain optimal performance only
using a few experiments rather than the unreliable hand-tuned
approach. In TACO, there are six control parameters to be optimized using Taguchi quality method, including three positive
constants , , Q, number of generation (NACO ), number of
artificial ants (m), and decay parameter (). Table I lists the
ACO control factors and their five levels, and Table II presents
the L25 (56 ) orthogonal array of the TACO in this paper. The
full factorial design method requires 56 = 15 625 experiments,
while the Taguchi method needs only 25 experiments to obtain
the approximate optimal values. This qualified TACO serves as
a slave processor in the proposed metaheuristic THPACOPSO
algorithm.
B. Taguchi-Based PSO
1) PSO for Solving Optimization Problems: In PSO computing, each particle represents a feasible solution of the optimization problem and is evaluated by the problem-dependent
fitness function. The particles are moving through a multidimensional search space, where the position of each particle
is adjusted according to its own experience and that of its

neighbors [7], [8]. The position of the particle is changed by

adding a velocity vi (t) to the current position, given by
xi (t + 1) = xi (t) + vi (t + 1)

(6)

where xi (t) is the position of particle i in the search space at

discrete time step t. The best position reached by the single
particle is called gbest and the best location found by the rest
of the swarm is called pbest . Each particle i renews its velocity
using pbest and gbest , expressed by
vij (t + 1) = wvij (t) + c1 1 (pbest xij (t))
+ c2 2 (gbest xij (t))

(7)

where vij (t) is the velocity of particle i in dimension j at time

step t, xij (t) is the position of particle i in j at time step t,
c1 and c2 are positive acceleration constants. 1 and 2 are
uniform random numbers with the range [0, 1], and w is called
inertia weight.
2) PSO Tuned With Taguchi Quality Method: TPSO is one
of the slave processors in the proposed THPACOPSO parallel
paradigm. Similar to TACO, this TPSO is a PSO soft computing tuned with Taguchi method using orthogonal array and

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL INFORMATICS, VOL. 11, NO. 4, AUGUST 2015

TABLE III
PSO C ONTROL PARAMETERS AND T HEIR L EVELS

where

sin((t))
cos((t))
P ((t)) =
sin((t))
cos((t))

cos((t))
sin((t))
cos((t))
sin((t))

L
L
.
L
L

(9)

R denotes the radius of each motorized wheel; L represents

the distance from the wheels center to the geometric center
of the mobile robot; i (t) and i (t), i = 1, 2, 3, 4, respectively,
denote the linear and angular velocities of each Swedish wheel;
[x(t) y(t) (t)]T represents the pose of the redundant mobile
robot in Cartesian coordinates.
In this redundant robotic system, the matrix P ((t)) in (9)
is not square because there exists a redundancy. Although the
matrix P ((t)) is singular for any , its left inverse matrix
can be found by P # ((t))P ((t)) = I3 , where I3 is the 3 3
identity matrix. This pseudoinverse matrix is expressed by
sin((t)) cos((t)) sin((t)) cos((t))
Fig. 2. Structure and geometry of the four-wheeled Swedish redundant mobile
robot.

SNR techniques. There are six control parameters in the conventional PSOs, including the number of generations (NPSO ),
swarm size (Ss ), neighborhood size (Ns ), and three positive
constants w, c1, c2. Table III lists the control parameters and
their five levels. Furthermore, the slave TPSO processor adopts
the Taguchi L25 (56 ) orthogonal array in Table II to determine
the qualified control parameters by using only 25 experiments.
C. Communication Module
In the proposed masterslave metaheuristic THPACOPSO
computing, each slave processor is regarded as an independent agent. Each slave processor independently evolves new
solutions in parallel, and the master processor is employed for
collecting and evaluating the best solutions in slave processors
to find the parallel global best (Gbest ), and then send it to each
slave processor. Therefore, the worst solution in each slave processor is replaced by the received parallel global best (Gbest ).
The master processor and two slave processors communicate
with each other in a communication interval.

P # ((t)) =

cos((t))
2
1
4L

sin((t)) cos((t)) sin((t))

2
2
2
1
4L

1
4L

1
4L

(10)

To express the kinematic model (8) in polar coordinates, we

have the following transformation:

r(t) = x2 (t) + y 2 (t), x(t) = r(t) cos (t),
y(t) = r(t) sin (t)
(11)
where r denotes the polar radius and represents the polar
angle in polar coordinates. With the time derivative of (11)
r(t)
=

x(t)x(t)
+ y(t)y(t)

x(t)x(t)
+ y(t)y(t)

=
r(t)
x2 (t) + y 2 (t)

x(t)

= r(t)
cos (t) r(t)(t)
sin (t)

(12)

y(t)
= r(t)
sin (t) + r(t)(t)
cos (t)
one can combine (10), (11), and (12) to obtain the kinematic
model of the Swedish four-wheeled mobile robot in polar coordinates. Thus, it follows from (12) that the time derivative of
the polar radius is given by
x(t)x(t)
+ y(t)y(t)

r(t)
x(t)r(t)

cos (t) + y(t)r(t)

sin (t)
=
r(t)
= x(t)
cos (t) + y(t)
sin (t)

1
1
sin((t) (t)) cos((t) (t))
=
2
2

r(t)
=
III. FPGA-BASED THPACOPSO FOR R EDUNDANT
C ONTROL OF M OBILE ROBOTS
A. Kinematic Model in Polar Space
Fig. 2 depicts the structure and geometry of the four-wheeled
Swedish omnidirectional driving configuration with respect to a
world frame in Cartesian coordinates. In what follows describes
the kinematic model of this kind of redundant robot, where
represents the vehicle orientation. The Cartesian-space kinematic model of the four-wheeled Swedish mobile robot is
presented in [22]; the relationship between the wheel velocity
vector and the vehicle velocity vector can be given by

R1 (t)
V1 (t)
x(t)

V2 (t) R2 (t)

(8)
(t) =
V3 (t) = R3 (t) = P ((t)) y(t)

(t)
V4 (t)
R4 (t)

R1 (t)
R2 (t)
1
1

sin((t) (t)) cos((t) (t))

R3 (t) .
2
2
R4 (t)
(13)
Using the equality


y(t)
cos (t) x(t)
sin (t) = r(t)(sin2 (t) + cos2 (t))(t)

= r(t)(t)

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919

and (12) yields

1
(y(t)
cos (t) x(t)
sin (t))
r(t)

1 1
1
=
cos((t) (t)) sin((t) (t))
r(t) 2
2

 R1 (t)
R2 (t)
1
1

cos((t) (t)) sin((t) (t))

R3 (t) .
2
2
R4 (t)
(14)
Moreover, from (10), it is easy to obtain

R1 (t)



= 1 1 1 1 R2 (t) .
(t)
(15)
4L 4L 4L 4L R (t)
3
R4 (t)

(t)

Combining (13), (14), and (15) gives the kinematic model

of the four-wheeled Swedish redundant mobile robot in polar
coordinates as follows:

R1 (t)
r(t)

R2 (t)

(t)
= T # (r(t), (t) (t))
(16)
R3 (t)

(t)
R4 (t)
where T # (r(t), (t) (t)) is defined at the bottom of this
page.
The pseudoinverse matrix of T # (r(t), (t) (t)) can be
found as below
T (r(t), (t) (t))

sin((t) (t)) r(t) cos((t) (t)) L

cos((t) (t)) r(t) sin((t) (t)) L

=
.
sin((t) (t)) r(t) cos((t) (t)) L
cos((t) (t)) r(t) sin((t) (t)) L
Note that T # ((t))T ((t)) = I3 , where I3 is the 3 3
identity matrix.
B. Pseudoinverse Tracking Control in Polar Coordinates
With the polar-space kinematic model of the four-wheeled
Swedish redundant mobile robot in (16), this section is devoted
to developing a kinematic locomotion controller to achieve trajectory tracking for the Swedish wheeled mobile robot in Fig. 2.
The trajectory control goal is to find the controlled velocity vec
T
tor V1 V2 V3 V4
to steer the redundant mobile robot from

T
any starting pose r0 0 0 to track any given time-varying,
T

smooth, and differentiable trajectory rd (t) d (t) d (t) .

T # (r(t), (t) (t)) =

1
2

sin((t) (t))

1
2r(t)

cos((t) (t))
1
4L

The current pose of the Swedish wheeled mobile robot is rep

T
resented by r(t) (t) (t) and the tracking error vector of
the redundant robot is expressed by

r(t)
rd (t)
re (t)
e (t) = (t) d (t) .
(17)
(t)
e (t)
d (t)
Thus, one obtains

R1 (t)
re (t)
rd (t)

(t)
R
2

e (t) = T # (r(t), (t) (t))

R3 (t) d (t) .
e (t)
d (t)
R4 (t)
(18)
The control aim is therefore  to find a set of control
T
output 1 (t) 2 (t) 3 (t) 4 (t)
that makes the closedloop system asymptotically stable. In doing so, the following
pseudoinverse redundant control law is proposed; the gain
matrices KP and KI are symmetric and positive definite,
meaning that KP = diag{Kp1 , Kp2 , Kp3 } = KPT > 0, KI =
diag{Ki1 , Ki2 , Ki3 } = KIT > 0

1 (t)
2 (t)
1

3 (t) = R T (r(t), (t) (t))

4 (t)

t

re ( )d
0
rd (t)
re (t)


e (t) KI t e ( )d + d (t) .
K

0
e (t)
t
d (t)
( )d
0 e
(19)
Substituting (19) into (18) leads to the underlying closedloop error system governed by

t

r ( )d
0 e
re (t)
re (t)


e (t) = Kp e (t) KI t e ( )d (20)

0
e (t)
t
e (t)
( )d
0 e
where the globally asymptotical stability of the closed-loop
error system (20) can be easily proven by selecting the quadratic
Lyapunov function

re (t)


1
re (t) e (t) e (t) e (t)
V (t) =
2
e (t)


t
t
1 t
+
re ( )d 0 e ( )d 0 e ( )d
0
2

t
r ( )d
0 e

t

(21)
KI
0 e ( )d .
t
( )d
0 e

12 cos((t) (t))
1
2r(t)

21 sin((t) (t))

1
2

cos((t) (t))

1
1
sin((t) (t)) 2r(t)
cos((t) (t)) 2r(t)
sin((t) (t))
.
1
4L

1
4L

1
4L

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Hence, for the robots polar-space kinematic model

(16) with the desired smooth and differentiable trajectory
T

rd (t) d (t) d (t)
and the trajectory tracking control law
(19), the Swedish mobile robot can be steered to exactly follow
the trajectory in the sense of globally asymptotical stability, i.e.,
r(t) rd (t), (t) d (t), and (t) d (t) as t .
C. Optimal THPACOPSO Locomotion Controller
Although the polar-space locomotion controller for the fourwheeled Swedish redundant mobile robots was synthesized in
(19) using the pseudoinverse control method, the two control matrices KP and KI were not optimally set to ensure
system stability and obtain optimal performance. This section
aims at developing an efficient THPACOPSO optimal controller for the four-wheeled Swedish mobile robots. The optimal control parameters KP = diag{kp1 , kp2 , kp3 } and KI =
diag{ki1 , ki2 , ki3 } are evolved via the THPACOPSO process
to achieve trajectory tracking.
In the proposed metaheuristic THPACOPSO for solving the polar-space optimal redundant control problem of
mobile robots, the ACO path of the TACO slave processor is defined by Path = {kp1 , kp2 , kp3 , ki1 , ki2 , ki3 }, and
the particle in the slave TPSO processor is expressed by
Particle = {kp1 , kp2 , kp3 , ki1 , ki2 , ki3 }. The optimal solutions
(control parameters) with minimum fitness value KP =
diag{k p1 , k p2 , k p3 } and KI = diag{k i1 , k i2 , k i3 } are
evolved by using the THPACOPSO evolution process described
in Section II to solve the robotic optimal redundant problem.
The fitness function of the proposed THPACOPSO in polar
coordinates can be defined by the integral square error (ISE)
 t
 2

re ( ) + e 2 ( ) + e 2 ( ) d
(22)
ISE =
0

where re and e are the position errors in polar coordinates and

e is the error of vehicles orientation. The SNR of the TACO
and TPSO in the proposed THPACOPSO redundant controller
is defined by
SNR = 10 log(ISE).

(23)

D. FPGA Implementation
Fig. 3 depicts the architecture of the Altera FPGA implementation for the proposed polar-space THPACOPSO redundant
locomotion controller using SoPC technology and hardware/
software codesign technique. There are four very high speed
integrated circuit (VHSIC) hardware description language
(VHDL) hardware intellectual property (IP) cores developed
for the four-wheeled mobile robot, including quadratureencoder-pulse (QEP), pulse width modulation (PWM), communication module, and digital filter. The QEPs aim at calculating
the posture of the mobile robot from the encoders mounted
on the dc motors. The PWM is a technique used to encode a
message into a pulsing signal for steering the dc motors. These
components are interconnected by means of the interconnection
network.

T
of
The current position and orientation r(t) (t) (t)
the Swedish redundant mobile robot in polar coordinates can

Fig. 3. FPGA realization of the proposed THPACOPSO redundant locomotion

controller.

be directly dead-reckoned by the embedded central processing unit (CPU) via the obtained QEP signals from the motor
encoders. With this QEP information, the proposed polar-space
THPACOPSO optimal locomotion controller determine the outT

to the PWM module,
put = 1 (t) 2 (t) 3 (t) 4 (t)
which conforms the pulse duration and then steers the four DC
brushless motors on the four Swedish omnidirectional wheels
to achieve trajectory tracking.
IV. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS AND D ISCUSSIONS
The aims of this section are to examine the effectiveness and
performance of the proposed polar-space THPACOPSO optimal redundant control law (19) to the four-wheeled Swedish
omnidirectional mobile robot. This heterogeneous parallelization strategy increases the searching diversity for this optimal
redundant problem.
A. System Architecture of the Experimental Swedish FourWheeled Mobile Robot
Fig. 4 presents the picture of the experimental mobile robot.
The four Swedish omnidirectional wheels are driven by four
dc brushless servomotors with four mounted rotary encoders
to provide QEP information and then achieve dead-reckoning
of the redundant mobile robot. The proposed metaheuristic
THPACOPSO tuning method and polar-space control law are
realized using C/C++ code in the embedded processors incorporating with the robotics custom logic IPs. In this study, the
FPGA chip integrated the embedded processors, real-time operating system (RTOS), lightweight IP (lwIP), and VHDL-based
IPs for performing the THPACOPSO optimal control law of the
Swedish mobile robot.
B. Polar-Space Limacon of Pascal Trajectory Tracking
This experimental result was conducted to explore how
the proposed embedded THPACOPSO polar-space locomotion controller (19) steers the Swedish mobile robot to track
the Limacon of Pascal trajectory expressed by rd (t) = 2 +
1.5 cos d (t) (m), d (t) = 0.2t (rad), and d (t) = /4 (rad).

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921

Fig. 6. Evolutions of performance index for the THPACOPSO and conventional Taguchi controllers.
Fig. 4. Picture of the experimental four-wheeled redundant mobile robot.

Fig. 7. Evolutions of performance index for the FPGA-based THPACOPSO,

hybrid, and parallel controllers.

V. C ONCLUSION

Fig. 5. Experimental result of the Limacon of Pascal trajectory tracking.

Fig. 5 depicts the experimental results in which the initial poses

are inside and outside the reference Limacon of Pascal trajectory. Moreover, Fig. 6 depicts the evolutions of performance
index of the proposed THPACOPSO and conventional Taguchibased paradigms to achieve this trajectory tracking. These
results indicate that the proposed THPACOPSO polar-space
locomotion controller (19) is capable of successfully steering
the Swedish mobile robot to track this special trajectory.
In order to exhibit the merit of the proposed polar-space
THPACOPSO tuning approach over conventional hybrid and
parallel approaches, Fig. 7 presents the evolutions of performance index for the proposed SoPC-based THPACOPSO
optimal redundant controller and the two conventional controllers to achieve this Limacon of Pascal trajectory tracking. As
shown in Fig. 7, the proposed FPGA-based THPACOPSO computational intelligence converges to the optimal solution with
better performance index.

This paper has presented an efficient THPACOPSO and

its FPGA realization to optimal polar-space locomotion control of four-wheeled redundant mobile robots. Based on the
polar-space kinematic model, the THPACOPSO optimal locomotion controller has been synthesized. Through experimental
results, the proposed THPACOPSO-based optimal locomotion
controller has been shown to achieve trajectory tracking successfully. These results indicate that the proposed FPGA-based
THPACOPSO polar-space redundant controller outperforms
the conventional controllers.
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Hsu-Chih Huang (S08M09) received the M.S.

degree in system on a programmable chip and
embedded systems from the Institute of Biomedical
Engineering, National Cheng-Kung University,
Tainan, Taiwan, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical
engineering from National Chung-Hsing University,
Taichung, Taiwan, in 1999 and 2009, respectively.
Currently, he is an Associate Professor with the
Department of Electrical Engineering, National Ilan
University, Yilan, Taiwan. His research interests
include intelligent control, mobile robots, embedded
systems, SoPC, and nonlinear control.