I .

A Comparison of Robustness:
Fuzzy Logic, PID, & Sliding Mode Control
Charles P. Coleman and Datta Godbole
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
University of California at Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720, USA

Abstract- This work is performed in order to D . A Call for Peace or at Least a Cease Fire! and
foster and promote unbiased and accurate compari- Negotiations
son of fuzzy logic control and classical control design
methodologies. We are motivated to execute this Fortunately, some have called for control engineers
study by the demonstrated robustness to plant per- to consider inclusion of fuzzy logic control into their
turbations of the fuzzy logic controller given in [l].
Robust fuzzy logic, PID, and sliding mode con- control enginering toolboxes, and for the utilization
trollers are designed to control the speed of a nominal of both fuzzy logic control and classical control when
third order linear timdnvariant model of a motor. and where appropriate ([12] [13]). This appears to
The step response performance of each controller, ap-
plied to the nominal and two perturbed motor plants, be a reasonable request. At the very least, the fuzzy
is presented. logic tool can be compared t o classical control tools.
We conclude fuzzy logic control can be a useful tool Should the fuzzy logic control tool prove useful and
for the control engineer. We encourage more bench-
mark comparisons of fuzzy logic control with classical acceptable to the control engineer, it should become
control techniques for the benefit of the practicing welcome addition to her control toolbox.
control engineer.
E. Robust Controllers
1. INTRODUCTION The control engineer is concerned about such prop-
A . New Control Tools, New Enemies? erties as the robustness of a controller to plant per-
turbations and uncertainty. We take the perspective
The successful use Of logic controllers has greatly of the control engineer who has several control tools
expanded in the last twenty years ([2]-[51)* This ex- available for the synthesis of robust controllers, and
Pansion has Prompted much comparison to classical who iS interested in determining the capabilities of
techniques* The ensuing diScussions have each control tool to synthesize a robust controller.
not always been amicable. Nor have they necessar- To assess the usefulness of each tool in designing
ily lead to manifest results and conclusions for the a robust controller, we chooeKa benchmark prob-
practicing control engineer. lem, and then engage in a comparison of the control
B. Debate and Dilemma designs which result from the application of each
control design method.
At times the debate over the use of fuzzy logic con-
trol techniques versus classical control techniques 11. CHOICE OF CONTROL TOOLS
h a become quite heated with ardent detractors on Fuzzy logic control, PID control, and sliding mode
both sides ([6]-[ll]). control tools are chosen for our investigation. Fuzzy
engineers have been placed in a logic control is chosen because of its empirically demon-
by this debate, and have been left with- strated robustness properties shown in [l]. PID con-
Out an Or comparison which trol iS chosen because it is one of the most corn-
to formulate a useful opinion. monly used controllers in industry, and because it
C. WelCBeing of the Control Engineer has plant perturbation robustness properties which
can be mathematically analyzed. We choose a slid-
In %he process of this raging and seemingly grow-
ing mode controller because it is a robust non-linear
ing battle, it appears that the best interest of the
control method whose robustness properties can also
control engineer has been occluded. The practicing
be mathematically analyzed.
control engineer usually has little interest in ideolog-
We do not claim to investigate and present every
ical debates. It is her interest to produce a working
robust control technique. Indeed, the popular and
controller, with efficacy, making use of any and all
successful H , and adaptive control techniques are
techniques a t her disposal.
noticeably absent from this study. We felt it was
necessary to restrict ourselves to fuzzy logic control
and two other control methods, in order to keep our

$4.0001994 IEEE
0-7803-1896-X/94 1654
study brief, intelligible, and meaningful.
111. CONTROLPROBLEM
A . Motor Speed Control
Motivated by the work in [l]and [14], and encour-
aged by the robustness results presented for fuzzy
logic control, we consider the robust speed control
of a rotating motor, modeled by a third order linear
time-invariant transfer function. The general con-
figuration for the motor speed control problem is
given in Figure 1.
Controller
I . I
Figure 1: Motor Speed Control Problem
We use the nominal plant, perturbed motor plants,
and the performance criteria given in [l] to design
and compare robust fuzzy, PID, and sliding mode
controllers.
B. Restrictions on Controller Inputs and Outputs
As shown in Figure 1, the reference step input speed
w, and the output motor speed wc are available for
comparison. Each controller only has access to the
motor speed error e = w, -w, and the motor angular
acceleration wc as inputs. Each controller produces
only one output U.
C. Nominal Plant
The nominal motor plant is modeled by the follow-
ing transfer function:
5 termined by min-inference. The crisp output U of
Gi(s) =
s(s + l)(s + 2)
D. Perturbed Plants
The two perturbed motor plants are given by the
following transfer functions:
5
G ~ ( s )= -
sys + 2) (3)
E. Performance Criteria
The designed controllers must be robust to varia
tions of system parameters. Specifically, for the
fuzzy logic, PID, and sliding control designs, one
single controller must render acceptable the closed
loop unit step responses of the nominal plant and
the two perturbed plants. To be acceptable, the
closed loop step responses must simultaneously have
short rise time and no overshoot.
F. Design Approach
We design the fuzzy, PID, and sliding mode con-
trollers based on the nominal plant given in e q u a
tion (1). Each designed controller is then applied
to all three transfer functions, and numerical sim-
ulations are performed to analyze the controller’s
robustness.
The design of the fuzzy logic controller is given
in Section IV. The design of the PID controller is
given in Section V. The design of the sliding mode
controller is given in Section VI. Plots of each con-
troller’s closed loop step response and control effort
are shown in Appendix A.
IV. ANALYSIS
A N D RECONSTRUCTION
OF A
FUZZY ROBUSTCONTROLLER
We implement the robust fuzzy controller given in
[l]and [14]. The inputs to the fuzzy controller are e
and b c . The output of the fuzzy controller is U. The
universes of discourse of e , bC,and U are partitioned
into seven fuzzy sets:
0 NB - negative big
0 N M - negative medium
0 NS - negative small
0 ZE - zero
0 PS - positive small
0 PM - positive medium
0 PB - positive big
Each fuzzy set is represented by a Gaussian mem-
bership function. The rule base of the fuzzy logic
controller contains forty-nine rules which are tabu-
lated in Figure 2. The output of each rule is de-
the fuzzy logic controller is generated by centroid
defuzzificat ion.
Figure 2: Fuzzy Logic Controller Rule Base
The step response of this fuzzy logic controller ap-
plied to the nominal and perturbed plants is shown
in Appendix A. The step responses for all three
plants have short rise times and no overshoot. Thus,
they meet the specified robust performance criteria.
The control effort generated by the fuzzy logic con-
troller is also shown in Appendix A.
v. ANALYSIS
AND SYNTHESIS OF AROBUST PID
CONTROLLER
The fuzzy logic controller designed in [l,141 is sim-
ilar to a nonlinear PD controller [15]. We design
a linear PID controller t o obtain satisfactory step
response for all three transfer functions.
A linear PID controller can be characterized by
the following transfer function:
(4)
Because, it is very difficult to realize a pure differ-
entiator, we use the following transfer function for
implementation.
C ( S )= K p +-
K d S
+-
T S + 1
K i
s (5)
To have a fair comparison, we use a small value for
K i = 0.001, just enough to keep steady state error
zero. We use a small value for T = 0.01, so that its
effect on the dynamics is minimal, but the derivative
controller is still realizable.
The selection of K p and K d is based on the root
locus of C(s)Gl(s). The root locus gives us the
locations of closed loop poles. The proportional
and derivative gain values are chosen such that the
closed loop pole locations are in the left half com-
plex plain for all three plants. Another criterion for
selection of these gains is the step response of the
closed loop system.
We select the following gains:
K p = 2, K d = 5
With these gains, the closed loop system is stable for
the open loop gain up to 51. Thus in particular, the
above PID controller stabilizes the systems given by
the transfer functions ('p2)* For the Of (3)7
we have closed loop stability for the open loop gain
upto 30. The step responses have no overshoot and
are critically damped.
VI. ANALYSIS
AND ROBUST
SYNTHESIS OF
MODECONTROLLER
SLIDING
To design a sliding mode controller, we convert the
transfer function model into state space format. The
controllable canonical form realization of the model
of (1) is given by:
= [; 0 -"2
1 z+[i]u
y = [ l 0 012 (6)
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We consider the following sliding surface for this
design:'
s = (i - i d ) + A l ( j l - aid) +A2(y - Yd) (7)
The choice of sliding surface is based on the follow-
ing considerations:
0 The relative degree of the system (6) with S as
output should be 1. This ensures that the input
U appears explicitly on the right hand side of S
equation.
System dynamics on the sliding surface should
be stable. (This requires AI, A2 > 0)
vd(t) specifies the reference trajectory to be tracked
by output. If one knows the entire trajectory of y d ,
then the derivative information i d ( t ) , &(t) can be
extracted off line and used in the design t o improve
the performance. If the information is not available
(or as in this case, Y d ( t ) being unit step, is nondif-
ferentiable) we can assume jld and lid to be zero and
let the robustness property of the sliding mode con-
troller take care of the mismatch.
With the definition of sliding surface as above, we
have reduced the design requirement from tracking
y d ( t ) to being on the surface s = 0. Once on the
sliding surface, the dynamics (equation 7) is e x p e
nentially stable and asymptotic trajectory tracking
is achieved. The control U is designed to make the
surface S = 0 attractive and to reach the surface in
finite time.
Consider the following lyapunov function:
1
v = - s 2
2
Its time derivative is given by
V=SS (9)
As the system has relative degree 1 with S as output,
we can solve for from the equation
S = -K sgn(S) (10)
This results in a negative definite V and also guar-
entees finite time convergence to the sliding surface.
But, the controller will result in high frequency chat-
tering near sliding surface. To avoid this, we use the
following expression to solve for u . ~
'Refer to [16]for details of sliding mode controller design.
2With this controller, the trajectory is not guarenteedt o reach
the sliding surface in finite time.
Expanding both sides of the equation, we get
s = -222 - 3x3 + 5u + A123 + A 2 2 2
= -K(23 + AIXZ + &XI - X2yd) Desired
The U obtained from this equation will be used for
the control.
This controller needs access t o all three states,
whereas the fuzzy logic controller of [l, 141 make
use of only x1 and 2 2 . To have a fair comparison,
we will construct an observer to get an estimate of
the state variable 23.
Standard Luenburger observer is designed t o get
an estimate of 2 3 . We use the model of (1) to design
the observer as follows:
f = AZ+bu+ L(y-y) (13)
y = cx
where, the matrices A , b and c correspond to the
model in equation (1). The matrix L is chosen such
that the eigenvalues of observer error dynamics (A-
LC) are in the left half plane and the error dynamics
is faster than the dynamics on the sliding surface.
The closed loop step responses with this controller
are shown in Appendix A. The controller is robust
to input gain changes as well as to the changes in
system dynamics while keeping the input magnitude
small.
Note: With the use of equation ( l l ) , the con-
troller is essentially a linear state feedback controller.
It results in closed loop eigenvalues of -1.3392 &
-4.33f.j 1.91 for model (1). The same controller,
when applied to other plants will give the following
closed loop eigenvalue locations:
Model of (2) + -1.32, -3.55, -19.12
Thus, by design, the increase in gain makes the
closed loop system more stable ...
Model of (3) 3 -1.4, -3.79 f j2.62
VII. CONCLUSIONS
A . Comments on Controller Designs
The control engineer proficient in PID and sliding
mode control techniques can readily synthesize ro-
bust controllers to perform the task dictated by this
example. As demonstrated in [l] and verified in this
study, the control engineer utilizing fuzzy control
techniques can readily achieve the same goal. Thus,
all three control tools are available to the control en-
gineer for use in synthesizing an acceptable robust
controller for this control problem.
With the appropriate software tools available, the
fuzzy logic controller for this problem was relatively
simple to implement, and it provided satisfactory
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results. Software tools were also available for the
design and simulation of the PID and sliding mode
controllers for this problems, and so these two con-
trollers were easy to implement.
B. Analytical Tools for the Analysis of Fuzzy Logic
Control
A control engineer adding the fuzzy logic control
tool t o her toolbox already full of classical control
tools, might ask “Why does this method demon-
strate robustness?”, and “When will it fail?” These
questions often have mathematically analytical an-
swers for classical control tools. To satisfy this in-
quiry, we call for the continued development of math-
ematically analytical tools to answer such questions
to the satisfaction of the control engineering com-
munity.
C. Fuzzy Logic Control: A Useful Tool
From our brief study, we conclude that fuzzy logic
control should have a place in the control engineer’s
toolbox. Only time, experience, and further anal-
ysis will determine whether fuzzy logic control be-
comes a prominent tool in the control toolbox used
by devotees of classical control techniques.
VIII. FUTUREWORK
We encourage more extensive fair and unbiased bench-
mark comparisons of fuzzy logic control with classi-
cal control techniques for the benefit of the practic-
ing control engineer, and we hope t o become a part
of this effort.
In the future, we hope to contribute t o the cre-
ation of new analytical tools for the analysis of fuzzy
logic controllers. We also hope t o be able t o con-
tribute to the continuing effort t o identify classes of
problems where rule based fuzzy logic control tech-
niques have advantages over and are more appropri-
ate than classical control techniques.
IX. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors would like to thank Professor S. Shankar
Sastry for his gracious support and encouragement.
The authors would also like to thank Dr. Shahram
M. Shahruz for helpful discussions.
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turbed model Gz(s)
 11

i Od

iK 0.6

I 0.4

02

0 5 10 15 25

Tim

Figure 5: Closed Loop Step Response of the per- Figure 7: PID Controller Control Effort
turbed model G ~ ( s )

Figure 6 : Fuzzy Logic Controller Control Effort Figure 8: Sliding Mode Controller Control Effort

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