A Comparison of Traditional and Soft-Computing Methods in a Real-Time Control Application

Abstract

The paper presents a performance comparison of traditional (controller based on a physical model) and soft-computing methods (neural and fuzzy controller) applied to a real-time control problem. The pros and cons of the controller paradigms will be investigated in this paper by means of an application example. In this example a ball has to be navigated through a maze mounted on a board. The board can be tipped in any direction using two step motors. An image of the board is supplied by a CCD-camera and two signal processors are used to process the image sequences and to generate motor step sequences, respectively. The results show that the choice of a suitable controller for a speciic task mainly is a trade-oo between the accuracy of the motion, the ball's speed and the execution time of the particular control algorithm.