A Novel Ball on Beam Stabilizing Platform with Inertial Sensors

This research paper presents a novel controller design for one degree of freedom (1-DoF) stabilizing platform using inertial sensors. The plant is a ball on a pivoted beam. Multi-loop controller design technique has been used. System dynamics is observable but uncontrollable. The uncontrollable polynomial of the system is not Hurwitz hence system is not stabilizable. Hybrid compensator design strategy is implemented by partitioning the system dynamics into two parts: controllable subsystem and uncontrollable subsystem. Controllable part is compensated by partial pole assignment in the inner loop. Prediction observer is designed for unmeasured states in the inner loop. Rapid control prototyping technique is used for compensator design for the outer loop containing the controlled inner loop and uncountable part of the system. Real-time system responses are monitored using MATLAB/Simulink that show promising performance of the hybrid compensation technique for reference tracking and robustness against model inaccuracies. Keywords—stabilizing platform; ball on beam; multi-loop controller; inertial sensors; rapid control prototyping; partial pole assignment