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A classical example of a complex control problem is the balancing of a ball on a beam. The system
comprises a slender beam on which a ball can roll without slipping. The shaft of a d-c motor is firmly
attached to the center of the beam, as shown in the figure.
Project
The goal of this project is to design a feedback control law which stabilizes the system, i.e., which brings
the ball to the center of the beam which is to be in the horizontal position.
Project should be submitted as a report, in good technical English, demonstrating the performance
achieved (scope traces of ball and beam displacements), explaining how you achieved it (Simulink dia-
grams, Matlab .m files, calculations, etc.) Animation of the process would be a plus.
The project is ”open-ended”. The goal is to produce a control system design that is likely to work if
implemented in hardware, and to demonstrate the predicted performance by simulation.
The following are some items you could investigate:
• Because of presence of the I + mr2 term in (3), the system remains nonlinear. If one assumes that
mr2 << I, the model becomes linear. If this assumption is not made, and the Riccati equations are
solved with x as a parameter, this becomes a “state dependent Riccati equation” (SDRE) application.
It would be of interest to compare performance of a fixed-gain full-state feedback control with the
control using SDRE.
• Assume that the observed variables are r and θ so the velocities ṙ, θ̇ must be estimated. The depen-
dency on r is also present in the observer design. It would be of interest to compare the performance
of the following: