Towards evolvable analog fuzzy logic controllers

Abstract

Fuzzy logic has proved to be a very powerful technique in the discipline of system control. A fuzzy logic controller is defined by a collection of fuzzy if-then rules and a set of membership functions characterizing the linguistic terms associated with the inputs and output of the fuzzy controller. This paper discusses the use of an evolvable hardware (EHW) platform in the synthesis of analog electronic circuits for fuzzy logic controllers. The EHW analog platform is a field programmable analog array (FPAA). FPAAs constitute the state of the art in the technology of reconfigurable platforms. These devices will become the building blocks of a forthcoming class of hardware, with the important features of self-adaptation and self-repairing, through automatic reconfiguration. Automatic reconfiguration of FPAAs has be driven by evolutionary computation techniques such as genetic algorithms. In this article we propose the implementation of fuzzy logic controllers, based on building blocks, developed on an FPAA, and present an intrinsic evolution example of a building block: a simple membership function.