Optimal Fuzzy PID Controller for a Magnetic Levitation System

This paper presents a magnetic levitation system which is a basic experimental platform for studying and understanding the working principle of a large-scale magnetic levitation train or frictionless vehicle. To control the stability of the system, an optimal range-based fuzzy logic controller is designed. The controller uses seven membership functions to adjust the voltage of the electromagnet according to the error and the change of error between the desired and actual positions of the ball. The proposed fuzzy logic controller is compared with a CTO-PI and CTO-PID. The results show that the proposed controller has better performance and robustness than the other controllers.