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Neurocontroller Alternatives For "Fuzzy" Ball-And-Beam Systems With Nonuniform Nonlinear Friction, Danil V. Prokhorov, Donald C. Wunsch, Paul H. Eaton

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The ball-and-beam problem is a benchmark for testing control algorithms. Zadeh proposed (1994) a twist to the problem, which, he suggested, would require a fuzzy logic controller. This experiment uses a beam, partially covered with a sticky substance, increasing the difficulty of predicting the ball's motion. We complicated this problem even more by not using any information concerning the ball's velocity. Although it is common to use the first differences of the ball's consecutive positions as a measure of velocity and explicit input to the controller, we preferred to exploit recurrent neural networks, inputting only consecutive positions instead. We have …