Implementation of ball and beam system using classical and advanced control techniques

The Ball and Beam System (B&BS) is an extensively used experimental setup to study, verify and to compare the performance of the conventional and advanced control techniques. The main thrust of this research is to develop a low cost and user-friendly model of the B&BS. First, a detailed mathematical model has been developed by considering the physical parameters of the system. This research has produced two controllers for stabilizing the designed B&BS setup. The first controller is a two degrees of freedom (2DOF) Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) controller. Its performance has been evaluated through MATLAB simulations and real-time experiments. The second one is a Fuzzy Logic controller. In this controller, Mamdani inference engine is used due to its intuitiveness, widespread acceptance and suitability to human-input. Triangular membership functions are selected for fuzzification process because of its ease in implementation. The whole system was fabricated using readily available materials and components. The real-time experimental data accruing from this system was used to validate the simulation results.