There exists an increasing demand for a flexible and computationally
efficient controller for micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) due to a high degree of
environmental perturbations. In this work, an evolving neuro-fuzzy controller,
namely Parsimonious Controller (PAC) is proposed. It features fewer network
parameters than conventional approaches due to the absence of rule premise
parameters. PAC is built upon a recently developed evolving neuro-fuzzy system
known as parsimonious learning machine (PALM) and adopts new rule growing and
pruning modules derived from the approximation of bias and variance. These rule
adaptation methods have no reliance on user-defined thresholds, thereby
increasing the PAC's autonomy for real-time deployment. PAC adapts the
consequent parameters with the sliding mode control (SMC) theory in the
single-pass fashion. The boundedness and convergence of the closed-loop control
system's tracking error and the controller's consequent parameters are
confirmed by utilizing the LaSalle-Yoshizawa theorem. Lastly, the controller's
efficacy is evaluated by observing various trajectory tracking performance from
a bio-inspired flapping-wing micro aerial vehicle (BI-FWMAV) and a rotary wing
micro aerial vehicle called hexacopter. Furthermore, it is compared to three
distinctive controllers. Our PAC outperforms the linear PID controller and
feed-forward neural network (FFNN) based nonlinear adaptive controller.
Compared to its predecessor, G-controller, the tracking accuracy is comparable,
but the PAC incurs significantly fewer parameters to attain similar or better
performance than the G-controller.Comment: This paper has been accepted for publication in Information Science
Journal 201