Adaptive Fuzzy Control Strategy for a Single-Wheel Transportation Vehicle

A novel model free adaptive Mamdani-like fuzzy controller (AMLFC) is adopted for a single-wheel transportation vehicle (SWTV) control problem in this study. A single-wheel transportation vehicle is designed and implemented. Single-wheel vehicles are simple in their mechanical frames. A single-wheel vehicle consists of a U-shaped platform, a wide wheel, and a DC motor with gearbox. A control technique for use by a person riding on an SWTV that enables real-world control of electric unicycles with unknown system external disturbances is proposed. Such an SWTV can move around stably. Moreover, an SWTV can also stand up in a fixed-point self-balance without touching the ground when a person rides on it. AMLFC is a modification of the usual Mamdani-like fuzzy controller. The main purpose of this study is to adopt an automatic balance control scheme for an electric unicycle motion control. Because the system model of the electric unicycle is time varying and nonlinear, an adaptive fuzzy control strategy with no system information is proposed. The AMLFC variables, including the mean and variance of membership functions, are tuned in real time based on the dynamic gradient descent method. Moreover, the learning rates of the parameter adaptive laws are decided by using the Lyapunov analytical method, which makes system error convergence. Therefore, it shows dynamic mapping and has good control performance compared with the existing Mamdani-like fuzzy controller. In addition, an SWTV based on a microcontroller with some handmade hardware circuits is implemented. Finally, the availability of the proposed novel adaptive Mamdani-like fuzzy controller is proven by the real-time application of SWTVs.