Cooperative control of a dual-motor ball and beam system

Abstract

We describe here a dual-motor ball and beam experimental setup that we built in the Networked Control Systems laboratory in the Department of Electrical Engineering at IIT Kanpur. This setup will serve as a testbed for various cooperative control and other control strategies that we plan to evaluate or develop in our lab. We present results from the application of two cooperative control strategies on this setup. We also describe the control-theoretic lessons we learned from building and running this setup that we could not have learned from a purely simulation-based study of the cooperative control strategies.