----------
> > Pease Porridge of
> > Electronic Design ran a contest for a Fuzzy Control system that he
could not
> > duplicate or exceed the performance of.  He won every challenge using
op-amps
> > and classic control theory. Fuzzy Control and Fuzzy Logic has had lots
of
> > boasting and very little real substance.

I was part of the debate with Bob Pease at two or three of the Fuzzy logic
conferences. Bob forced the issue in a nice way by challenging the fuzzy
people to deal in facts. There are two things that fuzzy does well. It
normalizes the parameters of problems very well. It also allows a simple
solution to be implemented for many non linear problems.

When Byte Craft was developing Fuzz-C we looked hard for applications
where fuzzy worked as well or better than conventional PID. When we did
we found that PID was highly optimized for a narrow range of
applications and fuzzy was a more general case.

For example look at the momentum difference in an aircraft control system
after the fuel stored in the wings has been burned in flight. A PID control
loop in such a system is very hard to tune.

Walter Banks
http://www.bytecraft.com