Development of a Didactic Educational Tool for Learning Fuzzy Control Systems

Abstract

This paper presents the development of a virtual didactic tool for students of mechatronic engineering taking an intelligent system course. The objective of the tool is for students to learn the structures for fuzzy control systems. This tool makes it easier for students to understand the behavior of the membership functions of input and output variables, the evaluation of the set of fuzzy rules, and the method of defuzzification, giving the students the possibility of applying a fuzzy controller in industrial processes using a data acquisition board. The proposed tool was developed with the virtual instrumentation software LabVIEW. It has the advantage that students can manipulate the internal structure of the fuzzy logic control system in a unique window where students can analyze the behavior of internal signals by looking at the response graphs. The fuzzy controller can be easily translated to a real application by using LabVIEW compatible hardware. To have feedback from students on the use of the tool and to understand if this tool allows an improvement in their academic performance, a 2-hour workshop on the proposed application was given to a group of 93 students. At the end of the workshop, a knowledge assessment and a perception survey were applied to the participants. The academic performance achieved by students who were given the workshop using the proposed teaching tool was compared with the academic performance of students who witnessed the workshop using Matlab tools. The statistical analysis of the results obtained for the knowledge assessment shows that the students that had taken the workshop using the proposed teaching tool had better compression of the topic compared to the students that had taken the workshop using the Fuzzy Logic Toolbox provided by Matlab MathWorks. The students that had taken the workshop using the proposed teaching tool obtained a mean grade of 89.63/100, while students that had taken the workshop using Matlab’s tools obtained a mean grade of 69.85/100. Also, the students’ perception of the proposed tool was that it allowed the design of fuzzy control systems in a simple and intuitive way.