Hardware/software codesign of configurable fuzzy control systems

Abstract

Fuzzy inference techniques are an attractive and well-established approach for solving control problems. This is mainly due to their inherent ability to obtain robust, low-cost controllers from the intuitive (and usually ambiguous or incomplete) linguistic rules used by human operators when describing the control process. This paper focuses on the hardware/software codesign of configurable fuzzy control systems. Two prototype systems implemented on general-purpose development boards are presented. In both of them, hardware components are based on specific and configurable fuzzy inference architecture whereas software tasks are supported by a microcontroller. The first prototype uses an off-the-shelf microcontroller and a low-complexity Xilinx XC4005XL field programmable gate array (FPGA). The second one is implemented as a system on programmable chip (SoPC), integrating the microcontroller together with the fuzzy hardware architecture and its interface circuits into a Xilinx Spartan2E200 FPGA.