Control of a Ball and Beam System under Intermittent Feedback

The control of a ball and beam system has been a well-known research subject and there have been a large number of related research results by far. To our best knowledge, however, all those existing results have basically assumed that their proposed controllers work under `good' or `normal' feedback conditions, which specifically means in this case that there is not any time period during which feedback is disrupted. In this paper, motivated by a recent open-loop time optimal result of [1], we suggest a new switching control method which can keep the states of a ball and beam system within certain bounds when there occurs a nontrivial feedback disruption during the operation of feedback controllers. Both simulation and experimental results are provided for verification.