Emotional controller (BELBIC) for electric drives - A review

Artificial intelligence (AI) and Biologically-inspired techniques, particularly the neural networks, are recently having significant impact on power electronics and electric drives. Neural networks have created a new and advancing frontier in power electronics, which is already a complex and multidisciplinary technology that is going through dynamic evolution in the recent years. But recently, a new type of the intelligent techniques, for control and decision making processes, was introduced that is based on the emotion processing mechanism in brain, and is essentially an action selection, which is based on sensory inputs and emotional cues. This intelligent control is inspired by the limbic system of mammalian brain. The proposed controller is called brain emotional learning based intelligent controller (BELBIC). This paper gives a comprehensive introduction and perspective of its applications in the intelligent control for electric drives area. The principal topologies of neural networks that are currently most relevant for applications in power electronics have been reviewed including the detailed description of their properties. Both feedforward and feedback or recurrent architectures have been covered in the description. The application examples that are discussed in this paper include different electric drives control as: Direct Current Motors (DC), Alternative Current Motors (AC) and Special Motors (SRM). In addition, almost all of the selected applications in the literature are included in the references. In the experimental and simulation works, novel and simple implementations of the drives system were achieved by using the intelligent controller, which control the motor speed accurately in different operating points. This emotional intelligent controller has simple structure with high auto learning feature that does not require any motor parameters, for self performance. The proposed emotional controller has been experimentally implemented in some of the laboratory electric drives, and shows excellent promise for industrial scale utilization.