Hardware fuzzy logic kit design

This paper demonstrates the developments of analog hardware fuzzy components. The developed hardware is implemented as a logic kit which consists of four basic fuzzy components: membership function generator (MFG), minimizing circuit (MIN), maximizing circuit (MAX) and a defuzzifier circuit. These components are designed and integrated as an educational kit using the available cheap IC's in the market such as operational amplifiers. MFG can be retuned using potentiometer knobs to obtain any piecewise linear characteristics such as triangular trapezoidal or singleton forms. To increase the reliability of hardware design, any two MFGs can be exchanged with a simple retuning operation for their parameters. The more difficult part to be implemented in an efficient way is the fuzzy inference. Therefore, this point is considered a challenge in the design and a new architecture is developed to optimize the number of MIN-MAX components to build the fuzzy inference circuit. The hardware kit can be used to build basic experiments on fuzzy logic and fuzzy control. The fuzzy logic kit is intensively tested in our laboratory and gave good results.