Control of a Modified Ball and Beam System Using Tracking System in Real Time with a DC Motor as an Actuator

This paper presents amodified ball and beam system, with the intention of realizing a test bed, to study new control techniques in real-time.The ball and beam system consists of a ball over a long beam where the control objective is to stabilizethe position of the ball on the beam by changing the angular position of the beam.In this paper, the ball of the conventional system is replaced by a cart with an embedded microcontroller, enabling the use of a linear encoder as position sensor and allowing to transmit the position via RF (Radio Frequency). The mathematical model of the ball and beam is obtained through the equations of Newton-Euler and the equations were linearized. The system is controlled using the hardware-in-the-loop technique with MATLAB/Simulink.It is applied a tracking control system with entire eigenstructure assignment to control the position of the cart. The actuator used is a DC motor, and a PID(proportional, integral and derivative) control is used to perform the angular position control of beam.The simulation results and the experimental results are compared to validate the mathematical model. The results obtained were satisfactory with adequate accuracy.