Design and hardware implementation of ball & beam setup

Abstract

Balancing a ball on beam is the classic control problem just like inverted pendulum. Undergraduate students are used to develop the mathematical models of such classic control problems. In this project we theoretically design the PID controller and implement it on a very cheap and cost effective hardware. PID controller for this project is a dedicated design and implementation of a system which balances a ball at a particular point on a beam using a PID controller. The ball is free to move on the beam in any direction due to force of gravity. Here, the PID controller set the angle of the beam to make sure that the ball gets stable at our specified set point by eradicating the error between the current position and the reference point. The whole system could be implement by employing a servo motor, an ultrasonic distance sensor, a microcontroller and a support assembly. We used “MATLAB R2013a” to draw the theoretical response of multiple controller and “Arduino 1.6.8” to draw the real time response of ball & beam setup. This system is prior edge towards correlating our theoretical concepts with real time experimental environment and helps towards sophisticated system in grasping and development.