Innovative initiatives in control education at Ryerson Polytechnic University. Fuzzy-logic control of the 3D-helicopter simulator

This paper describes one of projects undertaken at Ryerson Polytechnic University to integrate emerging trends in control engineering into the undergraduate curriculum. An intelligent control scheme based on fuzzy-logic, and developed for an experimental setup, is discussed. The process is a highly coupled 8th-order, multi-input multi-output, 3 degrees-of-freedom simulator of a helicopter. Currently the setup is used to develop control strategies for undergraduate thesis students. Eventually, the process will also be accessible to students remotely over the World Wide Web. The controller performance with the fuzzy-logic control (FLC) is benchmarked against that of a conventional controller. The simulations show that the system performance under FLC does not deteriorate away from the equilibrium point and remains comparable with, or superior to, the performance under the linear control, over the whole range of operating conditions of this setup