Customizable hardware design of fuzzy controllers applied to autonomous car driving

•A novel hardware architecture for fuzzy controller.•The architecture is customizable to any fuzzy model.•The architecture is fully parallel with real time response.•Application to autonomous car driving.

Nowadays, final products often encompass a certain intelligence therein to deal with variation or lack of precision in the sensing input data. This intelligence is usually acquired via the utilization of existing soft techniques, such as artificial neural networks, genetic algorithms and fuzzy control, among others. Thus, it is profitable to have on-the-shelf shell scalable and adaptive hardware designs that implement these soft techniques. This availability allows for an immediate embedding of any of those designs onto final products. This usually entails a reduced time-to-market of the product. Process control is one of the many applications that took advantage of the fuzzy paradigm. In general, controllers are embedded into the controlled device. This paper presents a novel design of a reconfigurable efficient parallel architecture to implement fuzzy controllers on hardware with almost no design effort for final users. The proposed architecture is herein proven suitable for embedding. It is customizable, so it allows the setup and configuration of the controller parameters, and hence its use for any problem application. Two fuzzy controllers that model autonomous car driving are implemented and their cost and performance evaluated.