Control of Underactuated Manipulators using Fuzzy Logic Based Switching Controller

This paper introduces a new concept for designing a fuzzy logic based switching controller in order to control underactuated manipulators. The proposed controller employs elemental controllers, which are designed in advance. Parameters of both antecedent and consequent parts of a fuzzy indexer are optimized by using evolutionary computation, which is performed off-line. Design parameters of the fuzzy indexer are encoded into chromosomes, i.e., the shapes of the Gaussian membership functions and corresponding switching indices of the consequent part are evolved to minimize the angular position errors. Such parameters are trained for different initial configurations of the manipulator and the common rule base is extracted. Then, these trained fuzzy rules can be brought into the online operations of underactuated manipulators. 2-DOF underactuated manipulator is taken into consideration so as to illustrate the design procedure. Computer simulation results show that the new methodology is effective in designing controllers for underactuated robot manipulators.