A Fuzzy Approach for Optimal Robust Control Design of an Automotive Electronic Throttle System

In this paper, we propose a fuzzy approach for optimal robust control design of an automotive electronic throttle (ET) system. Compared with the conventional ET control systems, we establish the fuzzy dynamical model of the ET system with parameter uncertainties, nonlinearities, and external disturbances, which may be nonlinear, (possibly fast) time varying. These uncertainties are assumed to be bounded, and the knowledge of the bound only lies within a prescribed fuzzy set. A robust control that is deterministic and is not the usual IF-THEN rules-based control is presented to guarantee the controlled system to achieve the deterministic performance: uniform boundedness and uniform ultimate boundedness. Furthermore, a fuzzy-based system performance index including average fuzzy system performance and control cost is proposed based on the fuzzy information. The optimal design problem associated with the control can then be solved by minimizing the fuzzy-based performance index. With this optimal robust control, the performance of the fuzzy ET system is both deterministically guaranteed and fuzzily optimized.