The paper discusses the development of a fuzzy inference system (FIS) based governor control for a pumped storage hydroelectric plant. The First Hydro Company's plant at Dinorwig in North Wales is the largest of its kind in Europe and is mainly used for frequency control of the UK electrical grid. In previous investigations, a detailed model of the plant was developed using MATLAB/sup (R)//SIMULINK/sup (R)/ and this is now being used to compare FIS governor operation with the proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller currently used. The paper describes the development of an FIS governor, and shows that its response to a step increase in load is superior to the PID under certain conditions of load. The paper proceeds to discuss the implications of these results in view of the possible practical application of an FIS governor at the Dinorwig plant.

This paper presents a new method of path planning for robot manipulators. It is a local roadmap method that is based on the tangent graph in configuration space. The graph is constructed incrementally as the search progresses, removing the pre-processing overhead of other methods; also, a heuristic is used to minimise the number of tangents generated. The technique is demonstrated by a simulation for a three-link planar manipulator.>