Fuzzy tuned PID controller for envisioned agricultural manipulator

The implementation of image-based phenotyping systems has be- come an important aspect of crop and plant science research which shown tremendous growth over the years. Accurate determination of features using images requires stable imaging and very precise processing. By installing a camera on a mechanical arm with a motor, maintaining accuracy and stability is very challenging and non-trivial. As per the state-of-the-art, the issue of external camera shake due to vibration is a great concern in grabbing accurate images, which may be induced by the driving motor of the manipulator. So there is a requirement of a stable active controller for sufficient vibration attenuation of the manipulator. However, there are very few reports in agricultural practice which use control algorithms. Although many control strategies have been utilized to control the vibration in manipulator associated to various applications, no control strategy with validated stability have been provided to control the vibration in such envisioned agricultural manipulator with simple low-cost hardware devices with the compensation of nonlinearities. So, in this work, the combination of PID control with Type-2 fuzzy logic (T2-F-PID) is implemented for vibration control. The validation of the controller stability using Lyapunov analysis is established. Torsional Actuator (TA) is applied for mitigating torsional vibration, which is a new contribution in the area of agricultural manipulator. Also, to prove the effectiveness of the controller, the vibration attenuation results with T2-F-PID is compared with conventional PD/PID controllers and type-1 fuzzy PID (T1-F-PID) controller.