Adaptive Fuzzy logic Position control
Of a Stepper motor with Extended Kalman
filter
Bindu V1, A Unnikrishnan2, R Gopikakumari1
1
Division of Electronics, School of Engineering, Cochin University of science & Technology, Kochi, India. 682022
2
Scientist H, NPOL, Kochi, India
(bindu_lal1@rediffmail.com, unnikrishnan_a@live.com, gopika@cusat.ac.in)
Abstract – The present paper proposes an adaptive
fuzzy logic control (AFLC) for the position control of
a Stepper motor. The weights used for combining the
fuzzy rules are also updated, using the least mean
square algorithm. The paper also demonstrates a
Kalman filter for the estimation of motor parameters
like speed and flux vector position. The estimation is
ensured to be robust even in the presence of arbitrary
fluctuation of the input line currents. The modified
Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) rejects the outliers in
real-time, thereby eliminating the need for manual
intervention in tuning the parameters of the EKF.
The stability of the controller is checked by
computing the Lyapunov exponent from the evolution
of the state space of direct axis current, quadrature
axis current, synchronous speed; and found to be
stable at all the time. The simulation results show that
the proposed control strategy operates robustly under
modeling uncertainty, with a good dynamic
performance.
Key words- Stepper motor, Adaptive Fuzzy logic
position control, Robust Kalman filter, Lyapunov
exponent.
I. INTRODUCTION
Stepper motors are digital actuators
which accept input pulses and respond to them by
rotating the output shaft by equal increments for
each input pulse. The stepping motors are mainly
used in simple point to point positioning tasks in
which they are open loop controlled [1]. The open
loop control does not use any information
regarding the motor shaft position or speed and in
open loop, the motor is driven by a train of pulses
with a predetermined time interval. There is no
guaranty that the motor uses all the pulses since
there is no feedback. The digital closed loop
principle was introduced in the 1970’s in order to
increase the accuracy positioning of the Stepper
 
motor while making it less sensitive to load
disturbances. In this paper, the closed loop control
is achieved by starting the motor with one pulse.
Subsequent drive pulses are generated as a function
of the motor shaft speed which is estimated by the
use of Extended Kalman filter.
In this paper, it is proposed to estimate
the speed of the motor and the rotor position from
the measurements of two phase stator currents,
using an Extended Kalman filter (EKF). The
estimate also produces other quantities, like
currents in direct and quadrature axes. The
proposed EKF estimation does not require the
information of the input voltage at all and it makes
it different from similar other works [2, 3]. So the
present estimation treats the whole problem as
blind system identification [4, 5]. However, the
main problem associated with the EKF is its
dependence on the parameters like the initial state,
initial state co- variance, the measurement noise
and the plant noise. The convergence is highly
dependent on the choice of the covariance matrices
of the plant noise and the measurement noise that
appear in EKF algorithm [6]. Here the
measurements to the EKF are the output of space
vector PWM inverter, which is non sinusoidal and
rich in harmonics, there by degrading the
performance of EKF. To overcome this problem, a
Robust Kalman Filter is used in modifying the
elements of the measurement covariance matrix, on
the run [7]. The estimated quantities show the
robustness of the technique adopted.
Now days stepper motors are mainly used
in closed loop control mode particularly for
machine tool and robotics applications. According
to F Betin,D Pinchon et. al. [1], the conventional
control strategies like PID control are not a good
choice because of its poor performance. In this
paper, the application of the fuzzy logic theory is
effectively used to control the speed of a stepper
motor. Compared to the traditional PI controller,






the FLC does not depend on precise system
and  are the direct axis and quadrature
mathematical model [8]. Over the last many years,
the fuzzy logic technique has become very popular
in the control of ac drives [8, 9] because of the
flexibility in accommodating overlapping
information in the definition of terms. The usual
approach is to compute a fuzzy function on the
error between the set speed and the estimated
speed, using a set of predefined rules. All the rules
are fired with equal weightage, wm to produce the
output, given by,
 
 
q=   state of nonlinear dynamic systems. The system is
 
Here ‘n’ is number of rules; µ m is the
membership of fuzzy function and wm is the
weightage. In order to optimize on the choice of the
rules to be fired in FLC, a gradient descent method
the coil.
axis currents.  is the differential operator. is the
moment of inertia.  is the viscous friction,!" is
load torque.  is the permanent magnet flux .( is
the shaft position of the motor , ( # )( .Where
N is the number of rotor teeth,( is the electrical
angle.
III. ESTIMATION OF STATE VECTOR WITH
ROBUST EKF
The Extended Kalman filter [13] is an
optimal recursive algorithm suitable to estimate the
described by the following state and measurement
equations
*+,- = f (*+ ) *+ +.+ +uk (3)
is used, in the present work, to adjust the weightage /+ =0+ *+ ++ (4)
wm of each of the rules of the fuzzy controller [10].
The resulting algorithm minimizes the square error where .+ , + are the zero mean white Gaussian
between the rotor speed and the reference speed. A noise , x = [ id iq ωr θ e]. the state vector and the Zk
fuzzy inference system also needs an effective the measurement vector
method to tune the membership functions so as to The measurements /+ are the two phase stator
ensure that the linguistic meaning of the variable is currents [12 13 ]. And u is the input voltages va and
fully absorbed in the definition. The proper vb .Here the state vector x is augmented with the
definition of the membership function minimizes voltage inputs va, vb. Then the new state vector X
the output error measure or maximize performance becomes [id iq ɘ ș vd vq].
index [11]. Accordingly, a gradient descent In discrete form the augmented state model is
technique is used to tune the mean and variance of represented as
 %7&
the Gaussian membership function based on the 6
:
error in speed. The resulting adaptive fuzzy 5  %7& 9
algorithm along with the Robust EKF is 5 %7& 9
demonstrated in an environment, where the Stepper 5 (%7& 9
5 9
motor runs in Simulink and rest of the speed 5
%7&9
estimation and the control run concurrently in 4  %7& 8
Matlab =
< @A D
II. MATHEMATICAL MODEL OF STEPPER 6 ;  =>?  B1C (  EF  :
=
MOTOR 5 < @A DEF 9
5  ;
=>? =
GHB (   9
A Stepper motor is an electromechanical
transducer, whose power drive supply 5I@A B1C ( @A GHB ( K;  @LM D  
9
 9N
5 J J J E
configuration is modified by each input pulse. To 5   DE ;   9
test the dynamic response of the motor, a 5     ;  9
mathematical model must be employed. The most 4      ; 8
popular model used by many researchers are the 
%7  ;&
Kuo [12] model, is used in this paper. Basically, 6 :
this model consists of electrical and mechanical 5  %7  ;& 9
5 %7  ;& 9
equations, are given by 5 (5)
(%7  ;& 9
5 9

   
  =
 

  +   (1) 5
%7  ;&9
       4  %7  ;& 8


The mathematical model of hybrid stepper
     !" # $ %  & (2)

motor is mutually coupled and hence nonlinear .For
'
this non linear system, an Extended Kalman filter is
#  (3) implemented. For a given sampling time Ts, both

where , are the direct axis and quadrature axis the state estimate*P
+O+ and its covariance matrix
voltages,L is the inductance and R the resistance of
Pk/k are generated by the filter through a two step equation. The results also show that the Kalman
loop predictor corrector process. The corrector filter has become robust against input variation,
process starts with an initial value of x,QROI- and with this technique.
follows as below:

IV.ADAPTIVE FUZZY LOGIC POSITION

The algorithm CONTROLLER
1. Computation of the Kalman gain The fuzzy logic controller is based on the fuzzy set
and fuzzy logic theory [14]. It provides an
$+ = Q+O+I- S+> (S+ Q+O+I- S+> algorithm which converts the linguistic control,
+R)-1 based on expert knowledge into an automatic
control strategy. Membership functions are used to
where $+ is the Kalman gain for kth iteration and represent the fuzzy set and in this paper, Gaussian
TU membership function is used. The error in position
S+ = V XX=*Y
+O+I- and R is a constant
TW ’e’ and the rate of change of shaft position error
measurement noise covariance matrix.
‘ρe,’ are used to define the input linguistic
variables and the output linguistic variable ‘q’ is
2. Updation of the estimate with the measurements
taken as the quadrature axis current . The support
for all the fuzzy variables viz. e and ρe, the output
*P
+O+ =*Y
+O+I- +$+ (/+ -0+ *Y
+O+I- )
variable q is scaled to [-1 1]. Seven membership
functions, viz., NB, NM, NS, ZO, PS, PM, PB, as
3. Updation of the error covariance as
shown in Fig. 1 are defined. If x is the input to the
Q+O+ = (I- $+ Hk)Q+O+I- .
node ‘i’ and Ai is the linguistic label (negative big
where I is a identity matrix. NB, negative medium NM etc) associated with this
4. Prediction of the error covariance matrix ahead node function, then the membership function µ Ai
as specifies the degree to which the given x satisfies
Q+O+I- = Z+ Q+I-O+I- Z>+ +Q. the quantifier Ai. Using the Gaussian function, the
membership function is represented as
[Ik _
where Z+ =
T%[&
XX=*Y efg %*& # hij% K M & (7)
TW +O+I- and Q is a constant l
process covariance matrix.
5 The state is predicted ahead as
1
*Y
+O+I- = f (*+ )*+
Beginning the iteration with an initial 0.9

value of X (0) and the Covariance QROI- \the 0.8

Kalman filter estimates the values of rotor shaft
position and the speed .The convergence of 0.7

Kalman filter is highly effected by the choice of 0.6

QROI- ,X(0), Q and R. Since the measurements
contain a large number of harmonics the 0.5

performance of the EKF is often tainted. In this 0.4

paper, the EKF is made more robust using an
alternate method, based on Bayesian approach [7]. 0.3

A scalar weight Gk is introduced for each data 0.2

sample/+ such that the variance of R is weighted
0.1
with Gk, given by
0
^,-O_ -1 -0.8 -0.6 -0.4 -0.2 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
]+ = c (6)
`,%aV IUV [Y
VOV &b< %aV dUV [Y
VOV &
a and b are taken as constants equal to one. This Fig 1 Fuzzy Gaussian membership functions
weight Gk is utilized to scale down the
measurement covariance matrix R, to be used in the where Ci and mi are the mean and variance of the
calculation of Kalman gain EKF algorithm. In function respectively. The overlap in the definition
other words, in the expression for Kalman gain, R is decided by the values of the premise parameters
is modified as R /Gk. During Ci and mi.
simulations, it has been observed that the robust
EKF eliminates the need for manual parameter The Fuzzy inference rules are listed in the table
tuning of measurement covariance matrix in EKF given below.
 TABLE 1
Rules of quadrature axis current Hybrid
Space vector Stepper
no e
PWM motor
e NB NM NS ZO PS PM PB
NB NB NB NB NB NM NS ZO
N NB NB NB NM NS ZO PS
M Fuzzy Logic
NB NB NM NS ZO PS PB Position
NS controller
NB NM NS ZO PS PM PB Line
ZO currents
PS NM NS ZO PS PM PB PB

PM NS ZO PS PM PB PB PB
PB ZO PS PM PB PB PB PB Δ ia

Using the product inference rule and central

average defuzzifier method the fuzzy output is Robust
expressed as + Kalman
- filter
 
 

q=   (8)
 
Set position θe
where n is the no. of rules, p is the weighting
factor and e g is the membership function of ith rule. Fig 2 Block diagram representation of the proposed
The weighting factor in (10) is updated by the control system
gradient descent technique. The main purpose of
adjusting these parameters of the fuzzy controller is
to minimize the sum of square errors between the
rotor speed and the reference speed. The V. COMPUTATION OF THE LYAPUNOV
instantaneous cost function is defined as: EXPONENT TO ASSESS THE STABILITY

J(k+1)=;Oqr %7  ;&  
P%7
"  ;&s2 (9) The Lyaponov exponent is an important
indicator of the stability of a nonlinear system.
where  is the reference motor speed and  Pis
" Given a continuous dynamical system in an n
the estimated speed. Following [10], the change in dimensional phase space, one can monitor the long
weight ( 10) is given by term evolution of an infinitesimal sphere of initial
condition. The ith one dimensional Lyapunov
{
npt %7& u vwxy% &$z o %7&  .. (10) exponent is then defined as follows [17]:



- ‚%ƒ&
B is the motor parameter, and o %7& is the .|g # }1~€ }H _ (12)
 ‚ %R&
instantaneous error in motor speed.
where Pi : the ith state variable of the phase plane
Ki and Ku are the scaling factors. The current The nature of the Lyapunov exponents provide an
command iq* is obtained by the output of AFC as indication of the stability of the system studies, as
explained below:
Iq*(k)=iq*(k-1)+ ku q(k) (11) | = 0 Ÿ a marginally stable orbit.
| < 0 Ÿ a periodic orbit or a fixed point
„…~HB…HCh| > 0 Ÿ Chaotic behaviour.
For the stepper motor studied, the state space
evolution of the vector [id, iq, ωe] it is collected in
sequence and the Lyaponov Exponents are
computed using Eqn. (12). It is seen that all the
Lyaponov exponents are negative i.e. : -5.7249 , -
8.3621 , -4.193
(taken from Sec. VI, below) , bring out the
stability of the system under control.
VI. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS
Simulation of the given Stepper motor has
5.7249, -8.3621 , -4.193, there by confirming the
stability
VII .CONCLUSIONS
A robust EKF algorithm along with LMS
based adaptive fuzzy, sensor less position
controller has been successfully implemented in
Simulink/Matlab environment. The performance
really shows that the controller is well suited for
14

been carried out using Simulink/Matlab, as shown 12

in Fig. 2. The Stepper motor parameters used for
simulation are as shown below: 10

S t e p p o s it io n in r a d
Permanent magnet /hybrid type,, 2 phases, R=0.7ȳ, motor shaft position
8 Reference position
L=0.0014H, =0.005wb/m2, J= 1.2e-7-m2
The stator currents are taken from the 6
motor model, running in Simulink. The EKF based
approach for the estimation of speed and rotor 4
position are found to be robust, for different step
changes. The estimation needs only the two phase 2
stator current values, which are easily available
0
from the machine. One of the main distinction from
similar other works in literature is that only two -2
stator currents are required in order to estimate six 0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25
Time in sec
quantities at a time. Fig. 3 and Fig. 4 indicate that
the estimation converges in less than 1m S, in Fig 3step position catches up with the reference position
response to a step change. The robust EKF ensures
9
that the estimation is stable, with the digital drive
from the PWM inverter, without having to trim the 8

values of R and Q of EKF. The EKF algorithm is 7

run in Matlab and is integrated with Simulink
S t e p p o s it io n in r a d

6
model of the motor, using embedded Matlab motor shaft position
5 Reference position
facility. Fig 4 shows the effectiveness in estimating
the rotor position very quickly even for step 4

changes in speed. Fig 4 shows that the motor 3

catches up the reference position in less than 1 mS, 2
with minimum variance showing the efficacy of the
1
adaptive weighting terms wi.
0
The proposed method also ensure that the
motor responds to step changes in speed very -1
0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25
quickly. The initial values X(0) and P(0/-1) and the Time in sec
matrices Q and R are carefully fixed so as to get the Fig 4 stepper motor position response
best convergence and stability. The values of those
matrices are given as:
R= diag[10;10;10] 20
X (0) = [0;0;0;0;0;0;0]T ;
s p e e d o f th e m o to r

Q= diag [100; 100 ; 100 ; 100; 100; 100] 10

P (0/-1). = diag[200; 200; 200 ; 200;200; 200]. 0

The sampling time chosen is 4.5 μS.
-10

The phase plane trajectory of the system is -20

1.5
plotted in Fig 5. The plot clearly indicates that 1 5
0.5
there exists a equilibrium point and hence the 0 3
4
-0.5 2
system is stable. The Lyapunov exponents are -1
-1.5 0
1
calculated and the negative values confirm the quadrature axis current direct axis current
stability. The Lyapunov exponent values obtained
for the three state variables viz.[id, iq, ωe] are : - Fig 5 Phase plane trajectory
 Effecting the step changes in position very quite [17] Xin Xiaonan,He Li,”Chaotic model of Permanent
magnet Linear Synchronous motor based on MATLAB”,2010
fast and total stability.. The Kalman filter proves its
IEEE Intenational conference ICEEE,Nov2010,pages1-4
competence as an estimator with a blind system
identification approach. The controller performance X BIOGRAPHIES
has been tested for various step changes in position,
in the Simulink enviournment and found stable and
convergent for all set position settings. Bindu V, received BTech
degree and MTech degree in
VIII ACKNOWLEDGMENT Electrical Engineering) from
The first author would like to thank the the Regional Engineering
Institute of Human resource Development for their College Calicut (Calicut,
sponsorship. Kerala, India) in 1995 and
2000 respectively. She is
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