Interval Type-2 Fuzzy Logic PID Controller Based on Differential Evolution with Better and Nearest Option for Hydraulic Serial Elastic Actuator

Interval type-2 fuzzy logic controller (IT2FLC) owns good performance under uncertainty and nonlinearity environments while its optimization is hard and complicated. In this work, we propose an optimization method based on differential evolution with better and nearest option (NbDE) for interval type-2 fuzzy logic PID controller (IT2FL-PID-C) in order to control the position of hydraulic serial elastic actuator (SEA). Firstly, a simplified IT2FL-PID-C structure with fewer parameters is proposed to reduce the difficulty of the optimization of IT2FL-PID-C. To balance its frequency and step performance, an objective function with weighted integral time absolute error and integral square error is given. Secondly, to investigate the performance of NbDE based IT2FL-PID-C, three experiments are conducted. A set of experiments is taken to determine the weight for fitness function. Then we compare NbDE with other algorithms. In addition, NbDE-IT2FL-PID-C is also compared with other optimization methods. At last, NbDE-IT2FL-PID-C is applied to hydraulic SEA and compared with PID. And a range for the weight of fitness function is given. The results have shown the superiority of NbDE with proposed fitness function to optimize IT2FL-PID-C and the superiority of NbDE-IT2FL-PID-C to control the position of hydraulic SEA.

Automated summary

In this work, an optimization method based on differential evolution is proposed to improve the performance of IT2FL-PID controller in controlling the position of hydraulic actuator. The simplified structure with fewer parameters and the objective function with weighted error terms are used to achieve a balanced control performance. The experiments conducted show the superiority of the proposed method in optimizing the controller and controlling the actuator position.