Modeling and control of dual motor Ball & Bean system

Abstract

Ball and beam balancer system is very popular and widely used in control system engineering due to its simple modeling and easy understanding. The conventional ball and beam balancer system is with a single motor (SMBB) and recently a new variant of ball and beam balancer system with dual motors (DMBB) has come up. The purpose of DMBB is similar to SMBB, which is to control the position of the ball on the beam. Compared with SMBB, DMBB use two motors to work together in order to achieve a satisfied control of the ball position. Before the controller design, the mathematical model of the system needs to be derived. PD controller and lead compensator are designed to perform the simulation with MATLAB/Simulink. Two DC motors integrated with reduction gearbox is used as the actuator in the prototype design and two incremental encoders work to form the motor feedbacks. Interfaced with the computer through DAQ card, the designed prototype is verified by LabVIEW. This prototype can be used to test certain control strategies that SMBB cannot.