DEVELOPMENT OF A POSITION AND TRAJECTORY TRACKING CONTROL OF BALL AND PLATE SYSTEM USING A DOUBLE FEEDBACK LOOP STRUCTURE

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Department of Engineering

ABSTRACT
This research work presents the development of a position and trajectory tracking control of ball and plate system. The ball and plate control system was considered as a double feedback loop structure (a loop within a loop), for effective control of the system. The inner loop was designed using linear algebraic method by solving a set of Diophantine equations. The outer loop was designed using H-infinity sensitivity approach. A virtual reality model of the ball and plate system using the virtual reality modelling language (VRML) and graphical user interface (GUI) based simulation model of the system were developed in MATLAB 2013a. The results of the simulation of the system showed that the plate was stabilized at 0.3546 seconds and the ball was able to settle at 1.7087 seconds. The trajectory tracking error of the system using the H-infinity controller was 0.0095 m. The improvements in terms of trajectory tracking error and settling time of the system when compared with the single loop H-infinity (SLH) controller are 71.8% and 60.5% respectively. The improvements when compared with the double loop structure using fuzzy sliding mode controller are 52.5% and 51.2% in terms of the trajectory tracking error and settling time respectively.