2170
4, JULY 2008
Robust RBFN Control for Linear Induction
Motor Drive Using FPGA
Faa-Jeng Lin, Senior Member, IEEE, Li-Tao Teng, Cheng-Yan Chen, and Chih-Kai Chang
Abstract—A field-programmable gate array (FPGA) based
robust radial basis function network (RBFN) control system is
proposed to control the mover position of a linear induction motor
(LIM). First, the indirect field-oriented mechanism is adopted
for the control of LIM. Next, an equivalent control law bases on
sliding-mode control is designed, in which the uncertainties are
lumped by a conservative constant. However, the lumped uncer-
tainty is unknown and difficult to obtain in advance in practical
applications. Therefore, a RBFN is derived to approximate the
equivalent control law in real-time, and a robust RBFN control
system with online training ability is resulted. Then, a FPGA chip
is adopted to implement the indirect field-oriented mechanism
and the developed control algorithms for possible low-cost and
high-performance industrial applications. The effectiveness of
the proposed control scheme is verified by some simulated and
experimental results. With the robust RBFN control system,
the mover position of the FPGA-based LIM drive possesses the
advantages of good transient control performance and robustness
to uncertainties in the tracking of periodic reference trajectories.
Index Terms—Field programmable gate array (FPGA), indirect
field-oriented control, linear induction motor (LIM), radial basis
function network (RBFN).
I. INTRODUCTION
F IELD programmable gate array (FPGA) incorporates the
architecture of gate arrays and the programmability of a
programmable logic device (PLD). It consists of thousands of
logic gates, some of which are combined together to form a
configurable logic block (CLB) thereby simplifying high-level
circuit design. Interconnections between logic gates using
software are externally defined through SRAM and ROM,
which will provide flexibility in modifying the designed circuit
without altering the hardware. Moreover, concurrent operation,
simplicity, programmability, a comparatively low cost and rapid
prototyping make it the favorite choice for prototyping an appli-
cation specific integrated circuit (ASIC) [1], [2]. Furthermore,
all the internal logic elements and all the control procedures
of the FPGA are executed continuously and simultaneously.
The circuits and algorithms can be developed in the VHSIC
hardware description language (VHDL) [1], [2]. This method
Manuscript received February 28, 2007; revised April 24, 2007. Published
June 13, 2008. This work was supported by the National Science Council of
Taiwan, R.O.C., through Grant NSC 95-2221-E-259-042-MY3. Recommended
for publication by Associate Editor P. Luk.
F.-J. Lin is with the Department of Electrical Engineering, National Central
University, Chungli 320, Taiwan, R.O.C. (e-mail: linfj@ee.ncu.edu.tw).
L.-T. Teng, C.-Y. Chen, and C.-K. Chang are with the Department of Elec-
trical Engineering, National Dong Hwa University, Hualien 974, Taiwan, R.O.C.
(e-mail: d9423001@em94.ndhu.edu.tw; m9423006@em94.ndhu.edu.tw;
m9323001@em93.ndhu.edu.tw).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TPEL.2008.924604
0885-8993/$25.00 © 2008 IEEE
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER ELECTRONICS, VOL. 23, NO.
is as flexible as any software solution. Another important
advantage of VHDL is that it is technology independent. The
same algorithm can be synthesized into any FPGA and even
has a direct path to an ASIC, opening interesting possibilities
in industrial applications in terms of performance and cost.
However, the major disadvantage of a FPGA-based system for
hardware implementation is the limited capacity of available
cells. Therefore, only research on FPGA-based sliding-mode
or fuzzy controllers can be found in high-performance control
application literature [3]–[5]. In addition, some FPGA-based
applications of various motor drives can be found in [6]–[9].
However, the FPGA-based control systems proposed by above
literatures do not have online learning ability.
Intelligent control approaches such as neural network and
fuzzy system do not require mathematical models and have the
ability to approximate nonlinear systems. Therefore, there were
many researchers using intelligent control approaches to rep-
resent complex plants and construct advanced controllers [10].
Moreover, the locally tuned and overlapped receptive field is a
well-known structure that has been studied in regions of cerebral
cortex, visual cortex, and so on [10]. Based on the biological re-
ceptive fields, the radial basis function network (RBFN) that em-
ploys local receptive fields to perform function mappings was
proposed in [11]. Furthermore, the RBFN has a faster conver-
gence property than a multilayer perceptron (MLP) since only
the connected weights between the hidden layer and the output
layer of the network are adjusted during training to reduce the
computational requirements. In addition, the RBFN has a sim-
ilar feature to the fuzzy system: first, the output value is cal-
culated using the weighted sum method; second, the number of
nodes in the hidden layer of the RBFN is the same as the number
of if-then rules in the fuzzy system; finally, the receptive field
functions of the RBFN are similar to the membership functions
of the premise part in the fuzzy system. Therefore, the RBFN is
very adaptable to the design of a FPGA chip and very useful to
be applied to control the dynamic systems [12], [13].
A linear induction motor (LIM) has many desirable perfor-
mance features including high-starting thrust force, no need for
a gear between motor and the motion devices, the reduction of
mechanical losses and the size of motion devices, a high-speed
operation, silence, and so on [14], [15]. Due to these advan-
tages LIMs have been used widely in industrial processes and
transportation applications [16]–[18]. The driving principles of
a LIM are similar to those of a traditional rotary induction motor
(RIM). However, the motor parameters are time varying due
to changes in operating conditions, such as the speed of the
mover, temperature and rail configuration. Moreover, there are
significant parameter variations in reaction rail resistivity, the
LIN et al.: ROBUST RBFN CONTROL
dynamics of the air gap, slip frequency, phase unbalance, satu-
ration of the magnetizing inductance, and end-effects [14], [17].
Therefore, its mathematical model is difficult to derive com-
pletely. Furthermore, since the operation of a LIM involves two
contacting bodies, a friction force is inevitably among the forces
of motion. In addition, this friction characteristic may be easily
varied due to change in normal forces in contact, and also the
temperature and humidity. Additionally, since friction is a nat-
ural phenomenon that is quite difficult to model, it is impossible
to obtain a precise friction model for practical applications [19],
[20]. On the other hand, the dynamic model of a LIM can be
modified from the dynamic model of the RIM at certain low
speed since a LIM can be visualized as an unrolled RIM. Thus,
field-orientated control [21], [22] can be adopted to decouple
the dynamics of the thrust force and the flux amplitude of the
LIM.
The motivation of this study is to propose a hardware online
learning robust RBFN control system due to its robustness to
confront the uncertainties that exist in a field-oriented control
LIM drive including the friction force. Moreover, the FPGA
chip is adopted to implement the proposed controller in order
to allow possible low-cost and high-performance industrial ap-
plications. The proposed control algorithms are realized on a
24-MHz FPGA (XC2V1000) with 1 million gate counts and
10240 flip-flops from Xilinx, Inc using VHDL. The design and
implementation of the FPGA-based control IC will be described
in detail. Compared with a DSP or a PC-based robust RBFN
control system, the merits of the FPGA-based robust RBFN con-
trol system are parallel processing and small size in addition to
low-cost. Furthermore, the developed VHDL code can be easily
modified and implemented to control any type of ac motors as
well.
II. INDIRECT FIELD-ORIENTED LINEAR
INDUCTION MOTOR DRIVE
The primary (mover) of the adopted three-phase LIM is
simply a cut open and rolled flat rotary-motor primary. The
secondary usually consists of a sheet conductor using aluminum
with an iron back for the return path of magnetic flux. The
primary and secondary form a single-sided LIM. Moreover, a
simple linear encoder is adopted for the feedback of the mover
position. The dynamic model of the LIM is modified from
the traditional model of a three-phase, Y-connected induction
motor in synchronous rotating reference frame [14]. The block
diagram of an indirect field-oriented LIM system is shown in
Fig. 1, where is the position of mover; is the reference
trajectory; is the velocity of mover; is the derivative of
reference trajectory; the -axis primary command current
is the command of flux current; the -axis primary command
current is the control effort. The indirect field-oriented LIM
system consists of a LIM, a ramp comparison current-controlled
pulsewidth modulation (PWM) voltage-source-inverter (VSI),
an indirect field-oriented mechanism, a coordinate translator,
and generator, where is the position of the sec-
ondary flux, a speed control loop, and a position control loop.
Three-phase current commands, , and are generated
2171
from the coordinate translator for the ramp comparison cur-
rent controller. By using of the indirect field-oriented control
technique, the electromagnetic force can be simplified by the
following equations [7], [21]:
(1)
(2)
where is the magnetizing inductance per phase; is
the secondary inductance per phase; , are the -axis
and -axis primary current; is the pole pitch. The curve
fitting technique based on step response is applied to find the
drive model off line at the nominal case ( 0). Moreover,
the scaling is necessary for the digital implementation of the
proposed FPGA-based LIM drive. The position resolution
of the encoder is 0.1(m)/1000 (digital) 0.1(mm) and the
velocity resolution is 1.6104(m/s)/22(digital) 0.073(m/s) at
the sampling frequency 732 Hz, and the conversion range of
the adopted D/A converter is 2047 to 2048 digital 5V
to 5 V, i.e., 1 V 409 digital. Therefore, by 1.6104/22
/409, the scaling is 29.9388 (m/s)/V. Then the results
are:
(3)
where is the total mass of the moving element; is the vis-
cous friction and iron-loss coefficient. The “-” symbol repre-
sents the system parameters in the nominal condition. Though
the electromagnetic force can be simplified as (1) via the field-
oriented control, considering the variations of system param-
eters and external nonlinear and time-varying disturbance in-
cluding friction force, the LIM drive system is a nonlinear time-
varying system in practical applications. Furthermore, since the
gains of the current controllers are large enough, the three-phase
current tracking responses are very close to three-phase current
commands. Therefore, the ideal current control is assumed in
the following proof to simplify the analysis. In practical appli-
cations, the current control is not ideal. However, the non-ideal
current control can be considered as external disturbance and
included in the lumped uncertainty, which will be described in
the next section, and confronted by the proposed RBFN control.
III. PROPOSED CONTROL SYSTEM
Consider a drive system with parameter variations, external
force disturbance and friction force for the actual LIM drive
system, then
(4)
(5)
where , 0, 1 ;
and denote the uncertainties introduced by system param-
eters and ; is the control input to the motor drive
system; is the external disturbance; is the friction force.
2172 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER ELECTRONICS, VOL. 23, NO. 4, JULY 2008

where is a positive constant. Then a switching function is de-

fined as

(12)

If the sliding mode occurs, i.e., , then

(13)

Substituting (11) into the derivative of (13), it can be obtained

(14)

which implies that .

In the design of the sliding-mode control system, the equiva-
lent control law, which will determine the dynamic of the system
on sliding surface, is found. The equivalent control law is de-
rived by

(15)
Fig. 1. System configuration of LIM drive.
Taking the derivative of (12) and using (7), then

Considering Coulomb friction, viscous friction and Stribeck ef- (16)

fect, the friction force can be formulated as follows [19], [20]:
Solving (15) with (16), one can obtain

(17)
(6)
However, the lumped uncertainty is unknown in practical
where is the Coulomb friction; is the static friction; is applications. Therefore, a RBFN is adopted to approximate
the Stribeck velocity parameter; is the coefficient of viscous the equivalent control law to ensure the control system is
friction; is a sign function. Reformulate (5), then asymptotically stable even if parametric uncertainty, external
force disturbance and friction force exist.
(7)
B. Description of RBFN
where is the lumped uncertainty and is assumed to be The architecture of a RBFN with receptive field units is
bounded. Moreover, the is defined by shown in Fig. 2(a). It comprises input layer, hidden layer and
output layer. The signal propagation and the basic function in
(8) each layer of the RBFN are introduced as follows.
Layer 1: Input Layer
In the input layer, the input vector of the RBFN is the
sliding surface and its derivative, .
A. Sliding-Mode Control
Layer 2: Hidden Layer
First, the position tracking error is defined as follows: In the hidden layer, the receptive field function is usually a
Gaussian function or a logistic function [11]. In order to re-
(9) duce the computational requirements in FPGA, a triangular
function shown in Fig. 2(b) is selected as the receptive field
and its derivative is function in the following:
if
(10) if

Now, an auxiliary signal is designed as follows: if

(11) (18)
LIN et al.: ROBUST RBFN CONTROL 2173

Fig. 3. Robust RBFN control system.

where ; is the
weighting vector as provided by tuning algorithm to be intro-
duced later. By universal approximation theorem, there exists
an optimal RBFN approximator in the form of (19) such that

(21)

where is the optimal weighting vector that achieve the per-

fect approximation; is the minimum reconstructed error. The
absolute value of is assumed to be less than a small positive
constant , i.e., . The control block diagram of robust
RBFN control system is shown in Fig. 3, which consists of a
RBFN approximator and a robust controller . The
proposed robust RBFN control system is designed in the fol-
lowing theorem to ensure the high-performance applications.
Theorem 1: Considering the system dynamic equation rep-
resented by (7), if the robust RBFN control system is designed
as (22) and (23) with the adaptation law shown in (24), then the
stability of the control system can be guaranteed

(22)
(23)
(24)
Fig. 2. (a) Network structure of RBFN. (b) Triangular function in hidden layer where is a positive constant.
of RBFN.
Proof: Define a Lyapunov function candidate as

(25)
where is the number of hidden nodes; is the center
of the triangle; is the center’s width of the triangular; where . Taking the time derivative of the Lya-
is the output of the hidden layer. punov function and using (16), one can obtain
Layer 3: Output Layer
In the output layer, the weighted sum method is used to
calculate the output of the RBFN, then the output becomes

(19)

where is the connected weight between the hidden layer

and the output layer. (26)
For ease of discussion, the output of the RBFN is rewritten as
follows: The approximative error is define as

(20) (27)
2174 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER ELECTRONICS, VOL. 23, NO. 4, JULY 2008

Substituting (27) into (26), it can be concluded that

(28)

To satisfy , the robust controller (23) and the adaptation

law (24) are substituted into (28), then

(29) Fig. 4. Block diagram of FPGA-based control system.

Since 0, is negative semi-definite [i.e., ],

which implies and are bounded. Define function
, and integrate function with
respect to time

(30)

Since is bounded, and is non-increasing and

bounded, the following result can be concluded:

(31)

Differentiate with respect to time

(32)

Since the lumped uncertainty is assumed to be bounded, all

the variables on the RHS of (16) are bounded, which means that
is also bounded. Moreover, since all the variables on the
RHS of (32) are bounded, is bounded. Then, is uni-
formly continuous [23]. By using the Barbalat’s Lemma [23],
[24], it can be shown that 0. That is, 0 as
. As a result, the tracking performance and stability of
the proposed robust RBFN control system for the LIM can be
guaranteed.
IV. CIRCUITS DESIGN ON FPGA CHIP
The block diagram of the FPGA-based control system for a
LIM drive using current-controlled technique is shown in Fig. 4.
The current-controlled PWM voltage source inverter is imple-
mented by an intelligent power module (IPM) switching com-
ponent (MUBW30-06A7) manufactured by IXYS Co. with a
switching frequency of 15 KHz. The timing control module,
encoder interface module, the field-oriented control module and
the robust RBFN control module are realized on the FPGA chip.
Fig. 5. Photograph of experimental setup.
The sampling interval of the control algorithms is 1.366 ms
(732 Hz). Three-phase current commands, , and are gen-
erated from the coordinate translator and sent to three D/A con-
verters for the ramp comparison current control. Moreover, two
D/A converters are utilized to display the reference trajectory
, the mover position , the control effort and the weight
alternately on the oscilloscope. The adopted D/A converters
are 12 b in size with an output voltage of 5 V. The entire I/O
port for this chip includes 2 pins for the input ports and 36 pins
for the output port. Furthermore, 2101 of 10240 flip-flops (20%)
have been used in the FPGA chip. In addition, the used gate
counts of the encoder interface module, the field-oriented con-
trol module, the data and D/A controller and the robust RBFN
control module are 67553, 84030, 677, and 39963, respectively.
Additionally, the circuits and control algorithms in the FPGA
LIN et al.: ROBUST RBFN CONTROL 2175

(a) (b)

(c) (d)

Fig. 6. Circuits design on FPGA. (a) Encoder interface module. (b) Field-oriented control module. (c) Sliding surface generator in robust RBFN control module.
(d) Input and hidden layer in robust RBFN control module.

are developed using VHDL by a personal computer (PC) as the results from the difference between the position signal and the
development system. In the development of the VHDL codes, all time delay of , .
the sine, cosine, multiplier and divider are implemented using
available intellectual property (IP). A photograph of the experi- B. Field-Oriented Control Module
mental setup including the FPGA chip, the development system, The field-oriented control module shown in Fig. 6(b) is com-
the motor drive and the LIM is shown in Fig. 5. posed of a generator, a coordinate translator, a and
generator and timing control. The is obtained using
A. Encoder Interface Module the estimated slip velocity signal , the control effort signal
, the velocity signal and an integrator. Then, and
The block diagram of encoder interface module is shown in signals are obtained through the and gen-
Fig. 6(a), which consists of timing control, two digital filters, erator. Moreover, three-phase current commands, , and
a decoder, an up-down counter, two clock (CLK) generators, a are generated from the coordinate translator, which consists of
register, a command generator and one adder. The function of six multipliers and five adders, and sent to three D/A converters
the encoder interface is to obtain the position and speed values of for the ramp comparison current controller. Each D/A converter
the mover. The pulse count signal PLS and the rotating direction needs 12 pins in the output port.
signal DIR are obtained using the A, B pulse input signals from
the decoder through two digital filters. The position signal can C. Robust RBFN Control Module
be obtained using the PLS and DIR signals through up-down To implement the control law effectively, the robust RBFN
counter. Moreover, the command generator includes periodic control module is divided into five parts which are shown in
sinusoidal IP and periodic trapezoidal IP in order to generate the Fig. 6(c)–(g). 1) Fig. 6(c) shows the block diagram of sliding
reference trajectory . Furthermore, is th velocity signal, and surface generator designed to obtain the sliding surface and
2176
(e)
(g)
Fig. 6. (Continued) Circuits design on FPGA. (e) Output layer in robust RBFN control module. (f) On-line learning algorithm in robust RBFN control module.
(g) Robust controller in robust RBFN control module.
its derivative using , and . First, the auxiliary signal
is obtained. Moreover, is obtained by a differentiator, which
is composed of a register and an adder, and is obtained by
an adder and a multiplier. Then, is obtained based on (12)
by using an adder. Finally, is obtained by a differentiator. 2)
Fig. 6(d) shows the block diagram of input and hidden layers
utilized to obtain the output of the hidden layer using
and based on (18). First, the ouputs of each neuron are gen-
erated using triangular functions where all the means are dis-
tributed among [ 1, 1] (digital value [ 409, 409]) and all the
widths of the triangulars are 1.0 (digital value 409). Then, two
multiplexers with a multiplier are utilized to multiply the output
of each neuron based on (18). 3) Fig. 6(e) shows the block di-
agram of output layer utilized to obtain the ultimate output of
the RBFN using based on (19). First, two mul-
tiplexers with a multiplier are utilized to multiply the outputs
of the hidden layer and the weights indi-
vidually. Then, the output is obtained through a register
and an adder. 4) Fig. 6(f) shows the block diagram of on-line
learning algorithm utilized to achieve the adaptation laws of the
weights between the hidden layer and the output layer based on
(24). First, the variations of the weights are ob-
tained by a multiplexer, three multipliers and a register. Then,
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER ELECTRONICS, VOL. 23, NO. 4, JULY 2008
(f)
the new weights are obtained by
adding the weights of current iteration with
. 5) Fig. 6(g) shows the block diagram of robust
controller utilized to achieve the robust control law using
based on (23). First, the sliding surface is operated using a sign
function . Then, is obtained by multiply a constant gain
to the output of the sign funtion.
V. SIMULATED AND EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
The control objective is to control the mover of the LIM to
move periodically according to reference trajectories including
sinusoidal and trapezoidal commands. To investigate the effec-
tiveness of the proposed robust RBFN control system, two cases
including the nominal condition (Case 1) and the parameter vari-
ation condition (Case 2) are considered here. In Case 2, one
iron disk with 5.71kg weight is added to the mass of the mover.
Moreover, to show the effectiveness of the control system with
small number of neurons, the RBFN has two, nine and one neu-
rons at the input, hidden and output layers, respectively.
A. Simulated Results
The simulation is carried out using “Matlab” package. To
demonstrate the control performance of the control system with
LIN et al.: ROBUST RBFN CONTROL
Fig. 7. Simulated results of robust RBFN control system for periodic sinusoidal
reference trajectory (0.2 Hz): (a) Tracking response at Case 1. (b) Tracking error
at Case 1. (c) Control effort at Case 1. (d) Connected weights between hidden
layer and output layer at Case 1. (e) Tracking response at Case 2. (f) Tracking
error at Case 2. (g) Control effort at Case 2. (h) Connected weights between
hidden layer and output layer at Case 2.
different reference trajectories, the simulated results due to pe-
riodic sinusoidal and trapezoidal commands are given. The con-
trol objective is to control the mover to move 0.1 m periodi-
cally for sinusoidal reference trajectory and 0.1 m periodically
for trapezoidal reference trajectory. The gain, threshold value
and learning rate of the robust RBFN control system are given
as follows:
(33)
These values are chosen to achieve the best transient control per-
formance in both the simulation and experimentation consid-
ering the requirement of asymptotical stability. Moreover, the
coefficients of the friction model used in this study are selected
as follows:
(34)
The simulated results of the robust RBFN control system
due to the periodic sinusoidal and trapezoidal reference tra-
jectories with frequency 0.2 Hz are shown in Figs. 7 and 8.
The tracking responses of the mover position due to the peri-
odic sinusoidal reference trajectory at Case 1 and Case 2 are
shown in Fig. 7(a) and (e); the tracking errors are shown in
Fig. 7(b) and (f); the associated control efforts are shown in
2177
Fig. 8. Simulated results of robust RBFN control system for periodic trape-
zoidal reference trajectory (0.2 Hz): (a) Tracking response at Case 1. (b)
Tracking error at Case 1. (c) Control effort at Case 1. (d) Connected weights
between hidden layer and output layer at Case 1. (e) Tracking response at Case
2. (f) Tracking error at Case 2. (g) Control effort at Case 2. (h) Connected
weights between hidden layer and output layer at Case 2.
Fig. 7(c) and (g); and two of the connected weights between
the hidden layer and the output layer of the RBFN, and ,
are shown in Fig. 7(d) and (h). Moreover, the tracking responses
of the mover position due to the periodic trapezoidal reference
trajectory at Case 1 and Case 2 are shown in Fig. 8(a) and (e);
the tracking errors are shown in Fig. 8(b) and (f); the associated
control efforts are shown in Fig. 8(c) and (g); and two of the con-
nected weights between the hidden layer and the output layer of
the RBFN, and , are shown in Fig. 8(d) and (h). From the
simulated results, satisfactory tracking performance and robust
control characteristics under the occurrence of the uncertainties
can be obtained for the proposed robust RBFN control system.
Furthermore, the connected weights of the RBFN are also well
trained to achieve excellent command tracking performance.
B. Experimental Results
Some experimental results are provided to demonstrate the ef-
fectiveness of the proposed FPGA-based control system. Figs. 9
and 10 depict the experimental results of the command tracking
due to the periodic sinusoidal and trapezoidal reference trajecto-
ries with frequency 0.2 Hz of the proposed robust RBFN control
system. The tracking responses of the mover position due to the
periodic sinusoidal reference trajectory at Case 1 and Case 2
2178
Fig. 9. Experimental results of robust RBFN control system for periodic si-
nusoidal reference trajectory (0.2 Hz). (a) Tracking response at Case 1. (b)
Tracking error at Case 1. (c) Control effort at Case 1. (d) Connected weights be-
tween hidden layer and output layer at Case 1. (e) Tracking response at Case 2.
(f) Tracking error at Case 2. (g) Control effort at Case 2. (h) Connected weights
between hidden layer and output layer at Case 2.
are shown in Fig. 9(a) and (e); the tracking errors are shown
in Fig. 9(b) and (f); the associated control efforts are shown in
Fig. 9(c) and (g); and two of the connected weights between the
hidden layer and the output layer of the RBFN, and , are
shown in Fig. 9(d) and (h). Moreover, the tracking responses of
the mover position due to the periodic trapezoidal reference tra-
jectory at Case 1 and Case 2 are shown in Fig. 10(a) and (e);
the tracking errors are shown in Fig. 10(b) and (f); the associ-
ated control efforts are shown in Fig. 10(c) and (g); and two of
the connected weights between the hidden layer and the output
layer of the RBFN, and , are shown in Fig. 10(d) and (h).
Since the parameters of the RBFN are initially set
to zero, accurate tracking control performance of the LIM drive
can be obtained after half cycle of on-line training of the RBFN
for periodic reference trajectories. In Fig. 10(a), the command
velocity is about 0.1 m/s. Though the command velocity is close
to the velocity resolution, however, it does not affect the tracking
performance since only position feedback signal with resolution
0.1 mm is used in the proposed robust RBFN control system.
Furthermore, from the experimental results, good tracking re-
sponses of the mover shown in Figs. 9(a), (e) and 10(a), (e)
can be obtained at both the nominal and the parameter variation
conditions. It also depicts that the proposed FPGA-based robust
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER ELECTRONICS, VOL. 23, NO. 4, JULY 2008
Fig. 10. Experimental results of robust RBFN control system for periodic
trapezoidal reference trajectory (0.2 Hz). (a) Tracking response at Case 1. (b)
Tracking error at Case 1. (c) Control effort at Case 1. (d) Connected weights
between hidden layer and output layer at Case 1. (e) Tracking response at Case
2. (f) Tracking error at Case 2. (g) Control effort at Case 2. (h) Connected
weights between hidden layer and output layer at Case 2.
RBFN control system has hardware online learning ability. In
addition, the tracking errors are about 1 and 2 mm after half
cycle of on-line training of the RBFN for the sinusoidal and
trapezoidal reference trajectories, respectively. Comparing to
the simulated results, the tracking errors are larger than the re-
spective simulated results due to the uncertainties including fric-
tion force, parameter variations and external disturbance in the
experimentation. On the other hand, since the precisely friction
model is difficult to obtain and the uncertainties are also difficult
to formulate in the simulation, therefore, the connected weights
shown in Figs. 7(d), (h) and 8(d), (h) are not the same as the
experimental results shown in Figs. 9(d), (h) and 10(d), (h).
To further demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed con-
trol system, the experimental results of the command tracking
due to the periodic sinusoidal and trapezoidal reference tra-
jectories with frequency 0.3 Hz are shown in Figs. 11 and 12.
In Fig. 12(a), the command velocity is about 0.15(m/s). From
the experimental results, the proposed robust RBFN control
system still has good tracking control performance. Moreover,
since the connected weights in the RBFN are initially set to
zero, the position overshoots are unavoidable in the experi-
mentation even with the nominal system parameters as shown
in Figs. 9(a), 10(a), 11(a), and 12(a). The position overshoots
LIN et al.: ROBUST RBFN CONTROL 2179

Fig. 12. Experimental results of robust RBFN control system for periodic
Fig. 11. Experimental results of robust RBFN control system for periodic si-
trapezoidal reference trajectory (0.3 Hz): (a) Tracking response at Case 1. (b)
nusoidal reference trajectory (0.3 Hz): (a) Tracking response at Case 1. (b)
Tracking error at Case 1. (c) Control effort at Case 1. (d) Connected weights
Tracking error at Case 1. (c) Control effort at Case 1. (d) Connected weights be-
between hidden layer and output layer at Case 1. (e) Tracking response at Case
tween hidden layer and output layer at Case 1. (e) Tracking response at Case 2.
2. (f) Tracking error at Case 2. (g) Control effort at Case 2. (h) Connected
(f) Tracking error at Case 2. (g) Control effort at Case 2. (h) Connected weights
weights between hidden layer and output layer at Case 2.
between hidden layer and output layer at Case 2.

can be avoided by the pre-training of the RBFN and using
the pre-training weights as the initial values of the connected
weights in the RBFN. However, to show the learning ability
of the FPGA-based RBFN control system, the pre-training
process is not adopted in this study.
VI. CONCLUSION
This study has successfully demonstrated the design and im-
plementation of a FPGA-based robust RBFN control system for
the position control of a LIM drive system. First, the indirect
field-oriented mechanism was introduced. Then, an equivalent
control law based on sliding-mode control methodology was de-
signed. However, since the lumped uncertainty is unknown and
difficult to obtain, a robust RBFN control system with online
training ability was proposed. Moreover, the robustness of the
proposed FPGA-based robust RBFN control system is achieved
under the occurrence of parameter variations and friction force
at various reference trajectories. Finally, the effectiveness of the
[10] J. S. R. Jang, C. T. Sun, and E. Mizutani, Neuro-Fuzzy and Soft Com-
proposed low-cost high-performance FPGA-based LIM drive
has been confirmed by some simulated and experimental results.
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Faa-Jeng Lin (M’93–SM’99) received the B.S. and

M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from National
Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan, R.O.C., in
1983 and 1985, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in
electrical engineering from National Tsing Hua Uni-
versity, Hsinchu, Taiwan, R.O.C., in 1993.
From 1993 to 2001, he was an Associate Professor
and then a Professor in the Department of Electrical
Engineering, Chung Yuan Christian University,
Chung Li, Taiwan. From 2001 to 2003, he was
Chairperson and a Professor in the Department of
Electrical Engineering, National Dong Hwa University, Hualien, Taiwan. From
2003 to 2005, he was Dean of Research and Development, National Dong Hwa
University, Hualien, Taiwan. From 2006 to 2007, he was Dean of Academic
Affairs at the same University. Currently, he is Professor in the Department
of Electrical Engineering, National Central University, Chung Li, Taiwan. He
is also the Chair, Power System Division, National Science Council, Taiwan,
2007 to 2009. His research interests include ac and ultrasonic motor drives,
DSP-based computer control systems, fuzzy and neural network control theo-
ries, nonlinear control theories, power electronics, and micro mechatronics.
Dr. Lin received the Outstanding Research Professor Award from the Chung
Yuan Christian University, Taiwan, in 2000; the Excellent Young Electrical En-
gineer Award from the Chinese Electrical Engineering Association, Taiwan, in
2000; the Crompton Premium Best Paper Award from the Institution of Elec-
trical Engineers (IEE), United Kingdom, in 2002; the Outstanding Research
Award from the National Science Council, Taiwan, in 2004; the Outstanding
Research Professor Award from the National Dong Hwa University, Taiwan, in
2004, and the Outstanding Professor of Electrical Engineering Award in 2005
from the Chinese Electrical Engineering Association, Taiwan. He is Fellow of
the Institution of Engineering and Technology (formerly IEE), U.K..