Fuzzy Logic Tuned PID Controller for Stewart Platform Manipulator
Dereje Shiferaw
Adama University
Department of Electrical Engineering
Adama, Ethiopia
derejdec@iitr.ernet.in,dnderejesh@gmail.com
Abstract— The Stewart platform manipulator is a 6DOF
manipulator having higher stiffness and precision compared to
serial manipulator. The control of this nonlinear MIMO system has
been a hot research issue in the past few decades and various
adaptive and robust controllers have been proposed. In this paper,
we present a model less adaptive controller using fuzzy logic. The
gains of the joint space PID controllers for each leg are tuned using
fuzzy logic and hence the system can effectively handle the
problem of variation of platform mass due to loading conditions.
The input to the fuzzy logic is a weighted sum of errors in the leg
lengths and hence the coupling between the legs, which is
drawback of independent leg PID control, is solved. Simulation
results show that the controller has a good adaptive performance
and achieves a better tracking accuracy than simple PID controller.
Keywords- Adaptive Controller, Fuzzy Logic, PID controller,
Stewart platform manipulator
) Stewart platform in a desired trajectory with a very good precision.
I. INTRODUCTION
The Stewart platform manipulator is a 6DOF parallel manipulator
having a fixed base and a moveable platform connected together
by six extensible legs, see Fig.1. It has advantages of high
precision positioning capacity, high structural rigidity, and strong
carrying capacity. Potential areas of application include flight and
other motion simulators, light weight and high precision
machining, data driven manufacturing, dexterous surgical robots
and active vibration control systems for large space structures
[4][14][15]. The control of this highly coupled nonlinear dynamic
system has been a hot research issue in the last few decades.
The various types of controllers designed for this platform can be
broadly classified as model less and model based controllers [6][7].
The model based controllers such as computed torque controllers
[1], sliding mode controllers [10] and passivity based controllers
[15] have the potential of giving higher precision in trajectory
tracking and global asymptotic stability can be achieved if the
dynamic model parameters are identified exactly. But the
complexity of the control algorithms has delayed their use in
practical application and PID controllers are still in use.
PID controllers, which are mostly implemented in joint space in
SISO, do not guarantee high performance because of the highly
nonlinear dynamics of the system and variation of the payload [1].
Therefore we propose here to use fuzzy logic to tune the gains of
PID controller to improve its performance. Fuzzy logic controllers
have been used for various applications and [3][8] [13][16] discus
the use of fuzzy logic for tuning the gains of a PID controller. In
Professor R. Mitra
Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee
Department of Electronics and Computer Engineering
Roorkee, India
rmtrafec@iitr.ernet.in
[3] the performance of a conventional PID controller tuned by
Ziegler Nichols method, a fuzzy logic PID like controller and a
PID controller whose gains are tuned by fuzzy logic have been
compared and it was verified that tuning the gains of PID
controller using fuzzy logic results in a better controller when the
controlled system has nonlinearity. In [13] the use of fuzzy logic
for tuning PID controller for non linear systems with H infinity
tracking performance is well reported and the paper has shown that
using fuzzy logic to tune PID controller gains will give a better
tracking accuracy for nonlinear systems.
In most of the above fuzzy logic based tuning algorithms, the
fuzzy rule base is obtained from step response of the controlled
system with the objective of minimizing settling time. In our
implementation, the fuzzy logic is used to tune the gain of the PID
online and moreover a weighted sum of errors is taken as input of
the fuzzy logic to consider the coupling between the legs.
Simulation results have shown that the controller drives the
The paper is organized as follows: section two discuss the
kinematic modeling of the robot, section three gives a brief
overview of fuzzy logic and the design of the controller. Section
four is about simulation results and then conclusion follows.
.
II. GEOMETRIC AND KINEMATIC MODELING
For geometric and kinematic modeling, the method proposed by
[12] is used. The centers of the universal and spherical joints are
denoted by Bi (i =1, 2 … 6 ) and Pi (i = 1, 2 , … 6) respectively.
Reference frames Fb and Fp are attached to the base and the
platform as shown in Fig.1. The position vector of the center of
universal joints Bi in frame Fb is bi and the position vector of the
center of spherical joints Pi in frame Fp is pi. Let r= [rx, ry, rz] be the
position of the origin Op with respect to Ob and also let R denote
the orientation of frame Fp with respect to Fb. Thus the Cartesian
space position and orientation of the moveable platform or end
effector is specified by X=[rx, ry, rz,, α, β,  ] where the three
angles α, β,  are three rotation angles that constitute the
transformation matrix R.
Then length of leg i is the magnitude of the vector BiP i which is
given by
Bi Pi  Rpi  r - bi  q i
(1)
This is the inverse geometric formula that gives the length of
each leg for a given desired position and orientation of the end
effecter. The direct geometric model which gives the position r=[rx
ry rz] and orientation angles α, β,  for a given measured value of
qi, i=1, 2, …, 6 is nonlinear and is solved using numerical
methods[5].
 The inverse kinematic model gives the velocity of the active Hence the parameters to be tuned are the three gains Kp, KD and
joint q for a given end effecter linear and angular velocity. KI. There are different tuning algorithms designed for linear
systems that aim at achieving control specifications such as set
 b vp  point following, disturbance rejection, robustness to model
q  J p  b 
b
uncertainty and rejection of measurement noise. The traditional
 ω p  tuning algorithms try to achieve one of these specifications. In the
(2) current application the system is required to follow a desired
Where bJp is the Jacobean matrix of the platform and is given by
trajectory, which means control objective is not regulation but
tracking, and moreover the system is required to operate at
a 31 (R.P1  r)X a 31  different payload conditions. Therefore the control system should
a (R.P2  r)X a 32 
be robust to model uncertainty and for that we use fuzzy logic to
 32 tune the three gains.
b
J p  .. .. .. .. 
  Fuzzy logic provides a formal methodology for representing,
a 36 (R.P6  r)X a 36  (3) manipulating and implementing a human heuristic’s knowledge
about how to control a system. The heuristic’s knowledge is
 
embedded into the controller in the form of IF…THEN rules.
Hence the fuzzy PID controller will have IF…THEN rules and an
and inference engine. The inference engine uses the rules to produce an
B i Pi output for a given input. The rules are of the following type.
a 3i  If E is PS and ER is NB then  is PS
B i Pi Where E and ER are inputs to the fuzzy logic system,  is the
(4)
output, PS and NB are linguistic values of the inputs and output.

Error, E and rate of error, ER are inputs to the controller and the
output  is the change in control gains. The terms PS and NB stand
for positive small and negative big respectively. Then a decision is
made about the current output value using an inference mechanism
and the rule base which contains IF…THEN rules. A final output
interface part converts the decision to a numerical value. The fuzzy
logic tuned PID control system discussed in this paper is shown in
Fig.2.

For the fuzzy logic gain tuning, error E and rate of error ER are
each divided into five linguistic values of negative big (NB),
negative small(NS), Zero(Z), positive big(PB) and positive small
(PS). The membership functions used are symmetric triangular
functions and they are shown in Fig.3. The output of the fuzzy
controller α used to change the gains of the PID controller as given
by the following algorithm.
K p k  1  K p (k)  α(k)e(k)K p 0
(7)
K D (k  1)  K D (k)  α(k)e (k)K D (0) (8)
Figure 1 Generalized Stewart Platform
K I (k  1)  K I (k)  α(k)e(k)e (k)K I (0) (9)
III. DESIGN OF CONTROLLER The starting value for the three terms is taken from a separate
A PID controller in its standard form is given as PID controller tuned manually and which gives acceptable output..
 det  1 
t
u t   K p et   Td   et dt 
IV. SIMULATION RESULTS

 dt Ti 0  For the simulation study of the performance of the

(5) controller, a typical 6-6 geometry Stewart platform with the
Multiplying the gain term outside the bracket by the geometric parameters given in table I is implemented using
derivative and integral time constants, the equation can also simmechanics tool box of MATLAB. The fuzzy logic tuner
be written as is also implemented using fuzzy logic toolbox of MATLAB
and three mfile sfunctions were written to implement the
det 
t
u t   K p et   K D  K I et dt
discrete difference equation given in (4)-(6). The trajectory
dt 0
 taken to test the performance of the controller is heave or
(6)
Figure 2 Fuzzy tuned joint space PID control of a single
leg

uplift motion in z direction for 2.5 sec followed by circular Figure 4 Graph of membership functions for error rate,
motion in the x-y plane. ER
.
To make the trajectory twice differentiable, the trajectories.
are joined with parabolic blend. The desired trajectories and
the actual trajectory for the simple PID and fuzzy tuned PID
is given in Figs. 6-8.

From the simulation results it can be seen that the

controller can track the desired trajectory to a better degree
of accuracy than the simple PID controller. The gains of the
controller used for the simulation are KP= 8.5x107,
KD=9x105, and KI=100 and the tracking error for these
values is given in Fig. 9 and 10.

Figure 5 Membership functions for output variable

TABLE I
Geometric Specifications of Stewart platform
Joint positions
Base

Platform

Base radius 0.8m

Platform radius 0.5m

Figure 3 Graph of membership functions for error E

CONCLUSION
A conclusion section is not required. Although a
conclusion may review the main points of the paper, do not
replicate the abstract as the conclusion. A conclusion might
elaborate on the importance of the work or suggest
applications and extensions
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