Adaptive Non-singleton Type-2 Fuzzy Logic Systems: A Way Forward for Handling Numerical Uncertainties in Real World Applications

<jats:p>Real world environments are characterized by high levels of linguistic and numerical uncertainties. A Fuzzy Logic System (FLS) is recognized as an adequate methodology to handle the uncertainties and imprecision available in real world environments and applications. Since the invention of fuzzy logic, it has been applied with great success to numerous real world applications such as washing machines, food processors, battery chargers, electrical vehicles, and several other domestic and industrial appliances. The first generation of FLSs were type-1 FLSs in which type-1 fuzzy sets were employed. Later, it was found that using type-2 FLSs can enable the handling of higher levels of uncertainties. Recent works have shown that interval type-2 FLSs can outperform type-1 FLSs in the applications which encompass high uncertainty levels. However, the majority of interval type-2 FLSs handle the linguistic and input numerical uncertainties using singleton interval type-2 FLSs that mix the numerical and linguistic uncertainties to be handled only by the linguistic labels type-2 fuzzy sets. This ignores the fact that if input numerical uncertainties were present, they should affect the incoming inputs to the FLS. Even in the papers that employed non-singleton type-2 FLSs, the input signals were assumed to have a predefined shape (mostly Gaussian or triangular) which might not reflect the real uncertainty distribution which can vary with the associated measurement. In this paper, we will present a new approach which is based on an adaptive non-singleton interval type-2 FLS where the numerical uncertainties will be modeled and handled by non-singleton type-2 fuzzy inputs and the linguistic uncertainties will be handled by interval type-2 fuzzy sets to represent the antecedents’ linguistic labels. The non-singleton type-2 fuzzy inputs are dynamic and they are automatically generated from data and they do not assume a specific shape about the distribution associated with the given sensor. We will present several real world experiments using a real world robot which will show how the proposed type-2 non-singleton type-2 FLS will produce a superior performance to its singleton type-1 and type-2 counterparts when encountering high levels of uncertainties.</jats:p>