A development tool for analog fuzzy controllers: Features and Applications

This paper describes an integrated development tool for analog fuzzy controllers which exploits analog hardware implementation and fuzzy logic flexibility to allow an easy and extremely low-costsynthesis of non-linear control laws.The core of the final implementation is a modular general-purpose analog fuzzy engine (AFE) withgood speed performance and built-in temperature compensation. To ease fieldprototyping, a digitally-programmable version of AFE is provided with a software layer computing thebiasing voltages needed by the circuit to fit numerical data and/or linguistic rulesspecified by the users. Once that the application is fine-tuned, a further software module isable to generate an optimized version of AFE dedicated to the task. An example application show that this approachcan lead to the implementation of effective analog controllers, fulfilling industrial requirements.