Design of an advanced incremental fuzzy logic controller for laser surface heat treatments

This work presents an innovative incremental PI fuzzy logic controller developed specifically to laser surface heat treatments, analyzing the specific issues related to the monitoring and control of the process. This real time control system improves considerably the treatment uniformity, reducing the rejection rate and increasing the productivity and final quality of the obtained products. An interesting contribution of this work is the characterization of the developed control strategy in terms of several quantitative criteria not usually analyzed, specially the design time and the experience and knowledge needed to develop and tune the control algorithm, without forgetting the classical validation criteria, such as the rise and settling time, the overshoot, and the steady state error, etc.