An alternative approach to design a Fuzzy Logic Controller for an autonomous underwater vehicle

This paper presents a control scheme that provides an efficient and a simple way to design a Fuzzy Logic Controller (FLC) for the autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). The proposed method, known as the Single Input Fuzzy Logic Controller (SIFLC), condenses the conventional two-input FLC (CFLC) to a single input single output (SISO) controller. The SIFLC significantly reduces the rules and simplifies the tuning of control parameters. Practically, it can be easily implemented by a look-up table using a low cost microprocessor due to its piecewise linear control surface. To verify the effectiveness of the designed controller, the control algorithm is simulated using the Marine Systems Simulator (MSS) on the Matlab/Simulink® platform. The result clearly indicates that both the SIFLC and CFLC give almost identical response to the same input sets. However SIFLC requires very minimum tuning effort and its execution time is in the orders of two magnitudes less than CFLC.