Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 13
Hardware Implementation of Embedded
Fuzzy Controllers on FPGAs and ASICs
Santiago Sánchez-Solano and María Brox
13.1 Introduction
Fuzzy logic was introduced by Zadeh (
1965
) as a tool able to describe the behavior
of complex systems by means of simple rules expressed in natural language (Zadeh
1965
,
1973
). Among the many applications of fuzzy logic, fuzzy control has been
one of the fields where fuzzy techniques have provided a greater amount of suc-
cessful results. This fact is mainly due to the capability of fuzzy systems to capture
the knowledge of human experts and translate it into robust control strategies, as
well as to model nonlinear input-output relations without the need for mathematical
models (Precup and Hellendoorn
2011
). Since the first practical application of fuzzy
control in 1975 (Mamdani and Assilian
1975
), the number of proposals using fuzzy
inference techniques to implement intelligent control systems in applications related
to automation, industrial control, robotics, and consumer electronics has increased
continuously (Jarris
2006
;Ross
2004
). As a consequence, many different implemen-
tation approaches for fuzzy systems have been proposed in the last years, which range
from software implementation using computer programs to hardware realization by
means of dedicated circuits (Baturone et al.
2000
).
The first fuzzy controllers were implemented in software on general-purpose
processors by using high-level programming languages and design tools able to gen-
erate optimized code for the different families of microcontrollers available in the last
decades of the past century. Software solutions provided high flexibility to implement
or modify the inference process. However, speed limitation, due to sequential pro-
gram execution, made them unsuitable for many real-time applications. To overcome
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