A Robot Manipulator with Adaptive Fuzzy Controller in Obstacle Avoidance

Building robots and machines to act within a fuzzy environment is a problem featuring complexity and ambiguity. In order to avoid obstacles, or move away from it, the robot has to perform functions such as obstacle identification, finding the location of the obstacle, its velocity, direction of movement, size, shape, and so on. This paper presents about the design, and implementation of an adaptive fuzzy controller designed for a 3 degree of freedom spherical coordinate robotic manipulator interfaced with a microcontroller and an ultrasonic sensor. Distance between the obstacle and the sensor and its time rate are considered as inputs to the controller and how the manipulator to take diversion from its planned trajectory, in order to avoid collision with the obstacle, is treated as output from the controller. The obstacles are identified as stationary or moving objects and accordingly adaptive self tuning is accomplished with three set of linguistic rules. The prototype of the manipulator has been fabricated and tested for collision avoidance by placing stationary and moving obstacles in its planned trajectory. The performance of the adaptive control algorithm is analyzed in MATLAB by generating 3D fuzzy control surfaces. © 2016, The Institution of Engineers (India).