Abstract—Piezoelectric micropumps such as the MP6 are widely used in portable and implantable microfluidic systems, where stable and accurate flow delivery is required under tight hardware constraints. Their coupled electro-mechanical and fluid dynamics, together with valve nonlinearities and viscosity changes, make fixed-gain linear control difficult to tune across the full operating range. This work develops a gain-scheduled fuzzy logic controller for the MP6 that uses flow error and its derivative as inputs, a compact 25-rule Mamdani structure, and gain factors obtained from open-loop characterisation at multiple flow rates. The controller is implemented on an STM32F4 microcontroller, and its timing and memory use are profiled. Closed-loop tests compare the fuzzy controller with a carefully tuned Proportional–Integral–Derivative (PID) controller over six flow setpoints from 13 to 700 μL/min and three working fluids: deionised water, a 10% glycerol mixture and phosphate-buffered saline. Performance is evaluated using settling time, overshoot, steady-state error and integral absolute error, with five repetitions per setpoint. Averaged over the six benchmarked setpoints from 13 to 700 μL/min, the fuzzy controller shortens settling time by about 33%, reduces overshoot by about 48% and lowers steady-state error and integral absolute error by roughly 42% and 31%, respectively, relative to PID. Stress-test operation at 800 μL/min, outside the benchmark range remained stable but showed increased oscillation, indicating the boundary of the current parameter set. These results indicate that gain-scheduled fuzzy control is a practical option for MP6-based drug-delivery and diagnostic systems within the tested flow and viscosity ranges and provide quantitative data to support future extensions to other micropump configurations.

Keywords—piezoelectric micropump, fuzzy logic control, gain scheduling, flow control, real-time embedded systems

Cite: Tuan-Anh Vu, Quang-Dich Nguyen, Quang-Thong Trinh, Thanh Lam-Bui, and Thai-Viet Dang, "Efficient and Computationally Lightweight Design for MP6 Piezoelectric Micropump Flow Regulation Using Gain-Scheduled Fuzzy Logic Control," International Journal of Mechanical Engineering and Robotics Research, Vol. 15, No. 3, pp. 315-330, 2026. doi: 10.18178/ijmerr.15.3.315-330

Copyright © 2026 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).