Backing Up a Truck and Trailer Using Variable Universe Based Fuzzy Controller

This paper presents an efficient and practical variable universe based fuzzy controller (VUBFC) for the control problem of backing up a truck and trailer. The design of VUBFC essentially amounts to (1) designing a typical fuzzy controller, and (2) choosing contraction-expansion factors on input-output universes. To design a VUBFC for truck backer-upper problem, we propose a new contraction-expansion factor on the universe of the fuzzy controller's output. Being with such a contraction-expansion factor, a VUBFC is able to vary the membership functions of its input-output valuables in response to the varying of system errors, thus to achieve a precise, efficient and energy-economic control. Moreover, such a VUBFC is easy to design because it is not difficult to construct a typical fuzzy controller from data or the experience of human experts, and we do not need to optimize the typical fuzzy controller integrated inside the VUBFC. Compared to the typical fuzzy controller, the newly designed VUBFC exhibits good performance in many ways in the simulation experiments