Evolving temporal convolutional neural networks for modeling turntable servo systems

Turntable servo systems are important experimental equipment used for semi-physical simulation and testing of aircraft, which have very strict requirements for tracking performance. To achieve high-precision servo performance, some advanced model-based control methods have been used recently, but the control performance is greatly influenced by the accuracy of the model. Therefore, this paper proposes evolving temporal convolutional networks (TCNs) for accurately modeling turntable servo systems. Considering the advantages of TCNs in capturing local dependencies in sequence data and parallel computing, a TCN is adopted to compensate the unmodeled dynamics to significantly improve the accuracy of the existing dynamics model. Then, an evolutionary algorithm (EA) based architecture optimization algorithm for the above TCN model is proposed, and the network performance is continuously improved by simulating the population evolution in nature. Finally, the weight inheritance method is utilized to evaluate the performance of individuals during the evolution process to effectively improve the execution efficiency of the whole algorithm. In addition, the subnets inherited from the supernet meet the real-time requirements of the actual tasks by setting real-time constraints on the supernet. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model against the peer competitors in terms of the prediction performance. In addition, the proposed optimization algorithm also shows higher execution efficiency as verified by ablation experiments. • A TCN-based modeling method is proposed for modeling turntable servo systems. • An EA-based architecture optimization algorithm is proposed for optimizing TCNs. • A weight inheritance method is used to improve execution efficiency of the algorithm. • Experimental results show the proposed model outperforms competitors in prediction.