IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON AUTOMATIC CONTROL, VOL. 39, NO.
9, SEPTEMBER 1994
A Supervisory Controller for 'Fuzzy
Control Systems that Guarantees Stability
Li-Xin Wang
A6stract- A supervisory controller is a controller which operates
only when some undesirable phenomena occur, e.g., when the state hits
the boundary of constraint set. In this note, we develop a supervisory
controller for nonlinear fuzzy control systems. The supervisory controller
works in the following way: if the fuzzy control system (without the
supervisory controller) is stable in the sense that the state is inside the
constraint set, the supervisory control is idle; if the state hits the boundary
of the constraint set, the supervisory controller begins operation to force
the state back to the constraint set. We prove that the fuzzy control
system equipped with this supervisory controller is globally stable in
the sense that the state is guaranteed to be within the constraint set
specified by the system designer. We also propose schemes by continuously
switching between supervisory and nonsupervisory modes. Finally, we
apply a fuzzy controller with the supervisory controller to the inverted
pendulum balancing problem where we require that the state variables
must be within a fixed bound.
I. INTRODUCTION
Conceptually, there are at least two different approaches to guar-
antee the stability of a fuzzy control system. The first approach is
to specify the structure and parameters of the fuzzy controller such
that the closed-loop system with this fuzzy controller is stable. An
example of this approach is [l]. This approach often requires the
fuzzy controller to satisfy some strong sufficient conditions which
greatly limit the design flexibility and, therefore, the performance of
the fuzzy controller. In the second approach, the fuzzy controller
is designed first without any stability consideration, then another
controller is appended to the fuzzy controller to take care of the
stability requirement. Because there is much flexibility in designing
the fuzzy controller in this second approach, the resulting fuzzy
control system is expected to show high performance. In this note,
we will detail the second approach.
The key is how to design the appended controller to guarantee
stability. Because we want the fuzzy controller to perform the main
control action, the appended controller would be better a safeguard
rather than a main controller. Therefore, we choose the appended
controller to work in the following supervisory fashion: if the fuzzy
controller works well, the appended controller is idle; if the pure
fuzzy control system tends to be unstable, the appended controller
begins operation to guarantee stability. Thus, we call the appended
controller a supervisory controller. In this note, we say a system is
stable if its state variables are uniformly bounded.
In Section 11, we show the details of how to construct a supervisory
controller for a nonlinear fuzzy controller system where the fuzzy
controller already exists and propose modifications of the supervisory
control which switch to the supervisory mode gradually. In Section
111, we apply the supervisory controller to the inverted pendulum
control problem. Section IV concludes this note.
Manuscript received June 4, 1993; revised September 15, 1993.
The author is with the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering,
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Hong
Kong.
IEEE Log Number 9402710.
0018-9286/94$04.00 0 1994 IEEE
1845
11. DESIGNOF THE SUPERVISORY CONTROLLER
Consider the nonlinear system governed by the differential equation
where x E R is the output of the system, U E R is the control,
x =
- (2,k , . . . , z ( ~ - ' ) )is
~ the state vector which is assumed to
be measurable or computable, and f and g are unknown nonlinear
functions. We assume that g > 0. From nonlinear control theory
[2] we know that this system is in normal form, and many general
nonlinear systems can be transformed into this form. The main
restriction is that the control U is required to appear linearly in the
equation.
Now suppose that we have already designed a fuzzy controller
21 =U f k ) (2)
for the system. This can be done by synthesizing fuzzy control rules
from human experts andor by trial and error using designing tools.
Our task is to guarantee the stability of the closed-loop system and,
at the same time, without changing the existing design of the fuzzy
controller u f . More specifically, we are required to design a controller
whose main control action is the fuzzy control us and that the closed-
loop system with this controller is globally stable in the sense that
the state g is uniformly bounded, i.e., Ig(t)l 5 M,, W > 0, where
M , is a constant given by the designer.
For this task, we append the fuzzy controller u f with a supervisory
controller u3 which is nonzero only when the state 4hits the boundary
of the constraint set {g: 121 5 M,}, i.e., the control now is
U = U&) +I*U&) (3)
where the indicator function I* = 1 if 2 M , and I* = 0
if < M,. Therefore, the main control action is still the fuzzy
control u f . Our task now is to design the u s such that we always
have Ig(t)l 5 M , for all t > 0.
Let us first examine whether it is possible to design such a super-
visory controller without any additional assumption. Substituting (3)
into (1) we have that the closed-loop system satisfies
(4)
Now suppose = M , and thus I" = 1. Because we assume that
f(g) and g ( g ) are totally unknown and can be arbitrary nonlinear
functions, for any we can always find f(g) and g ( g ) such
that the right-hand side of (4)is positive, and therefore we will have
1g1 > M,. Thus, we must make some additional assumptions on
f(g)and g ( g ) for such us design possible. We need the following
assumption.
Assumption: We can determine functions fU (g)and gL (g)such
that lf(g)I 5 f'(g) and 0 < g L ( g ) 5 g ( g ) , i.e., we assume that
we know the upper bound of If(g)l and the lower bound of g ( g ) .
In practice, the bounds f U ( g )and g L ( c ) are usually not difficult
to find because we only require to know the loose bounds, i.e., f U ( g )
can be very large and gL(z) can be very small. Also, we require to
have state-dependent bounds, which is weaker than requiring fixed
bounds.
Before we design the supervisory controller u s , we need to write
the closed-loop system equation into a vector form. First, define
1846 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON AUTOMATIC CONTROL, VOL. 39, NO. 9, SEPIZMBER 1994

where & = (k,,...,k~)~E R” is such that all roots of the 111. APPLICATION
TO INVERTED PENDULUM BALANCING
polynomial S” + k1 sn-’ + +
. . . k , are in the left-half complex In this section, we apply a fuzzy controller with the supervisory
plane. Using this U * , we can rewrite (4) as controller to the inverted pendulum balancing problem. The control
34”) = -&Tg + g [ U f - + I*U,].
U*
goal is to balance the inverted pendulum and, at the same time,
guarantee that the state is bounded within a fixed interval. Let z1 = 6
Define be the.angle of the pendulum with respect to the vertical line and
1 0 0 .’’ 22 = 6, the dynamic equations of the inverted pendulum system are
- 0
0 0 1 0 ... 21 =22 (15)
A, = . . . ... ... ... .. . . .. ...
0 0 0 0 ... 0 1
--kn -knpl ... . .. ... ...

0 where g =9.8 m/s2 is the acceleration due to gravity, m , is the mass

b,= [j.] of cart, m is the mass of pole, 1 is the half length of pole, and U is
the applied force (control). We chose m, = 1 kg, m = 0.1 kg, and
2 = 0.5 m in the following simulations. Clearly, (16) is in the form
then (6) can be written into the vector form of (l), thus our approach applies to this system.
Assume that the fuzzy controller u f is constructed from the
following four fuzzy IF-THEN rules

Now we design the supervisory controller u s such that 121 5 M,. IF 21 is positive and 2 2 is positive,
Define the Lyapunov function candidate THEN U is negative big (17)
v = r2 4T p 4 (10) IF z1 is positive and x2 is negative,
THEN U is zero (18)
where P is a symmetric positive definite matrix satisfying the
IF 2 1 is negative and 2 2 is positive,
Lyapunov equation
THEN U is zero (19)
A T P + P A , = -Q (1 1) IF 2 1 is negative and x2 is negative,
where Q > 0 is specified by the designer. Because A, is stable, such THEN U is positive big (20)
P always exists [2]. Using (9) and (11) and considering the case
where the fuzzy sets “positive,” “negative,” “negative big,” “zero,”
141 2 M,, we have
and “positive big” are characterized by the following membership
+
V = - $gTQg gT Pb,[uf - U* + u.] functions, respectively

5 14TPb,l(lufI + b*l)+zTPb,us. (12) ppositive(2) =

1
p (21)
Our goal now is to design u s such that V 5 0, i.e., the right-hand side
of (12) is nonpositive. Observing (12) and (5), we choose the U, as
PLnegative big (U) = e-(u+5)2 (23)
pzero(U) = e-,’ (24)
Substituting (13) into (12) we see that we have V 5 0. Therefore, ppositive big(U) = e-(u-5)2. (25)
the supervisory controller u s of (13) guarantees that 141is decreasing Using center average defuzzifier and product inference [3], [4], we
if Igl 2 M,, therefore if we choose the initial Ig(0)l 5 M,, we obtain the fuzzy controller u f as
always have 121 5 M,. Because g > 0 and 4 and P are available,
sign (gTPb,) in (13) can be determined. Also, all other terms in (13)
are available, thus the U, of (13) can be implemented on-line.
Because the I* in (3) is a step function, the supervisory controller
begins operation suddenly as g hits the boundary 141 = M , and is
idle as soon as the 4 is back to the interior of the constraint set
141 5 M,, therefore the system may oscillate across the boundary
line 141 = M,. One way to overcome this “chattering” problem is to
let I* continuously change from zero to one. Specifically, we may
choose the I* as
To design the supervisory controller, we first need to determine the
0, 141 < a bounds fU and g L . For this system, we have
I* - MMz- ap a ’ a 5 141 < (14)
1, 141 2 M z

where a E (0, M,) is a parameter specified by the designer. Using

this I* in (3), the supervisory controller U, operates continuously
from zero to full strength as 4 changes from a to M,. Obviously,
9.8 +e x ;
5 2 0.05
this I” can also guarantee that 141 5 M , (using exactly the same 3 1.1

proof procedure as above). = 15.78 + 0.03662:: = fu(z1, 2 2 ) . (27)

 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON AUTOMATIC CONTROL, VOL. 39, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 1994 1847

I 'I

6 7 8 9 1 0

Fig. 1. The closed-loop system state ~ ( tfor) the five initial conditions Fig. 3. The same as Fig. 2 except that a white Gaussian noise with variance
using only the fuzzy controller. 3 was added to the control U .

IV. CONCLUSIONS
In this note, we developed a supervisory controller for fuzzy control
systems which can guarantee that the state of the closed-loop system
is uniformly bounded. The advantage of this approach is that we do
I5 not need to change the design of the fuzzy controller to guarantee
stability; this permits us to design high-performance fuzzy controller.
The disadvantage of this approach is that we require to know the
bounds of the nonlinear functions in the system and, if the bounds
are too loose, we may require heavy control activity. We applied
the approach to balance the inverted pendulum and showed how the
supervisory controller forced the state to be bounded and how the
: l 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
fuzzy controller balanced the inverted pendulum.
Fig. 2. The closed-loop system state z l ( t ) for the five initial conditions
using the fuzzy controller with the supervisory controller.
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p = r 5 51
5 5 '
We simulated three cases: 1) without the supervisory controller,
i.e., only use the fuzzy controller (26), 2) use the supervisory
controller together with the fuzzy controller, and 3) same as 2)
except that a white Gaussian noise with variance 3 was added to
the control U which may represent some wind-gusts disturbance.
For each case, we simulated the closed-loop system for five initial
conditions: (xl(O),~ ( 0 ) = ) (4", 0), (8", 0), (lZo, 0), (16", 0),
(20", 0). The simulation results for cases I), 2), and 3) are shown
in Figs. 1, 2, and 3, respectively, where we show the angle z l ( t )
as a function of t for the five initial conditions. We see from these
results that: 1) the pure fuzzy controller could balance the inverted
pendulum for smaller initial angles 4", 8", 12", but the system
became unstable for larger initial angles 16" and 20", 2) by appending
the supervisory controller to the fuzzy controller, we successfully
balanced the inverted pendulum for all the five initial angles and
guaranteed that the angle is within [-20", 2O"], and 3) the fuzzy
controller was robust to random disturbance.