Using Social Behavior of Beetles to Establish a Computational Model for Operational Management

In this article, we computationally model the social behavior of beetles and apply it to the tracking control of manipulators. The beetles demonstrate excellent skills to forage food in a previously unknown environment by merely using their olfactory senses. The goal of the beetle is to search the region with the maximum smell. Therefore, the actions of the beetle can be characterized as an optimization algorithm. This article mathematically models this behavior in the form of a recurrent neural network (RNN) with a temporal-feedback connection. We apply the formulated RNN controller for the redundancy resolution and tracking control of the redundant manipulators with an unknown kinematic model. Most of the industrial robots have redundant manipulators, and kinematic trajectory tracking is a fundamental problem for any industrial task. The behavior of the beetle allows us to formulate a position-level controller without relying on the manipulation of the Jacobian matrix. It is in contrast with the conventional velocity-level controllers, which require an accurate kinematic model of the manipulator and calculation of pseudoinverse of Jacobian, a computationally expensive task. The proposed algorithm, called Beetle Antennae Olfactory Recurrent Neural Network (BAORNN) algorithm, is capable of driving the manipulator by only using the feedback from the position and orientation sensors. The stability and convergence of the proposed algorithm are theoretically proved, and the simulations results using a seven-degree-of-freedom (DOF) industrial robotic arm, KUKA LBR IIWA14, are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm.