- This paper presents an extended control concept for automatic track guidance of industrial trucks in intralogistic systems. It is based on Reinforcement Learning (RL), a method of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The presented approach is able to adapt itself to different industrial truck variants and to the associated specific vehicle parameters. In order to avoid starting the whole
training of the controller for each truck variant from scratch, the training process is divided into two steps. In the first step, the controller is trained on a simplified linear model using parameters
of a nominal vehicle variant. Based on this, the control parameters are only fine-tuned in the second step using a more complex nonlinear model, representing the real industrial truck. In this
way, the controller is adapted to the actual truck variant and the corresponding parameter values. By using the nonlinear model, it can be ensured that the forklift’s dynamic is approximated
within the entire operating range, even at high steering angles. Moreover, the influence of the disturbance variable of the system (path curvature) is compensated by considering this a priori
knowledge within the control design. Therefore, the
Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) of the RL controller and the observation vector are suitably adjusted. In this way, the occurring path curvatures can be considered in both training steps and the control parameters can be optimized accordingly. Thus, the influence of the disturbance variable can be compensated, which significantly improves the control quality. In order to demonstrate this, the new approach is compared
to an RL control concept, which is not considering the disturbance variable and to a classical
two-degrees-of-freedom (2DoF) control approach.