A comparative study of PI, fuzzy, and ANN controllers for chopper-fed DC drive with embedded systems approach

Attempts are being made to enhance the drive performance by intelligent control using fuzzy logic (FL) and neural network techniques. One of the frequently discussed applications of artificial intelligence in control is the replacement of a standard proportional plus integral (PI) speed controller with an FL or artificial neural network (ANN) speed controller. Regardless of all the work, it appears that a thorough comparison of the drive behavior under PI, FL, and ANN speed control is necessary. This article attempts to compare PI, fuzzy, and ANN controllers that are implemented in an embedded system for closed-loop speed control of DC drive fed by a buck-type DC-DC power converter. The PI controller is designed based on the small signal modeling of the system. The PI-like fuzzy controller structure is considered for comparison. Two ANN controllers are designed. One controller uses training data obtained from the simulation of a fuzzy controller and the other uses training data from the simulation of a PI controller. The performance of the controllers is studied for a variety of operating conditions, such as step change in speed command and step change in load torque. The parameters selected for the comparison are the steady-state error and the rise time of the response. It is shown that ANN speed controllers provide a superior speed response in terms of rise time and the steady-state error compared to PI and FL controllers. This advantage arises from the fact that the neural network has the property of generalization and the control surface of the neural controller is smooth. The designed neural network controller is simple, with three neurons only, and so it is best suited for embedded system implementation. It is also found that the ANN controller trained with the training data from a PI controller has a better response compared to the ANN controller trained with data from a fuzzy controller.