Robust Control of a Ball and Beam System Through Sliding Mode Controller

This paper presents the design of an optimal control strategy for a 2 degree of freedom standard laboratory system - Ball and Beam. The system is an open loop and non-linear system, which is inherently unstable. The control of The Ball and Beam system is very important in the aviation and space fields because of its similarity to the control of aircraft during the flight, landing and turbulent. Since real experiments are not possible in these areas, using Ball and Beam systems in the control laboratories has become necessary. This paper proposes a robsust controller design via sliding mode control approach. A Sliding mode controller (SMC) is designed and implemented with an objective to control the ball position on the beam by varying the angular position of beam. We design a discontinuous sliding mode controller which overcomes the problems associated with the set of singular states. The modelling and simulation of the SMC strategy for controlling the system is carried out on MATLAB SIMULINK platform. The SMC strategy is very effective in stabilizing the system. A comparative analysis is also presented by varying the parameter (mass of ball) of system in simulation.