Creating an AI Controller: Surface Results

One issue I've been struggling with while working with my AI controller is determining a method for evaluating controller performance. Today I've finally implemented a results section for my application, allowing me to view many statistics after running a timed trial of the controller.

Nothing fancy, the results section gives the lowdown on how the controller performed during a trial.

During run time, the result reporter simply records the position and velocity of both the line and the car. Later, the results are processed to determine many statistics including:

• the total deviation from the line over the course of the trial
• the mean deviation from the line
• the median deviation from the line
• the standard deviation of this data
• the percentage of time the system spends in each membership set for inputs and output of the controller

The first four things on that list will allow me to evaluate controller performance, while the last will help me determine whether the track was a good trial for the controller's abilities.

I would like to add the ability to export these results in an Excel-friendly way. I doubt this will be too difficult, but I'll leave it for another day.

I also played around with MATLAB today to obtain a surface diagram for the controller. This graph shows the response curve for the controller output given the two inputs. Ideally, such a graph should have a (relatively) smooth slope, and I'm happy to see that mine does.

The surface diagram from MATLAB is a 3D representation of the action that will be taken given a pair of inputs (position and velocity)

Tomorrow I'll be looking into genetic algorithm tuning for the controller. I expect it to be quite a big undertaking, but I'm also very excited!