Design and Implementation of Ball and Beam System Using PID Controller

The ball and beam system is laboratory equipment with high nonlinearity in its dynamics. The main ideas of the paper are to model the ball and beam system considering nonlinear factors and coupling effect and to design Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) controller to control the ball position. The system consists of an Arduino microcontroller. It receives the ball position from ultrasonic distance sensor and compares it with the desired distance which can be set by the user. PID algorithm has built in Arduino to process the difference in signal between desired and real position into control signal. Arduino sends control signal to the DC servomotor which rotate to change the ball position and meet the desired distance. MATLAB software program has been used to plot instant system response by interfacing Arduino with computer to determine the system characteristics with different values of controller parameters in order to choose parameters values which obtained best performance for the system.