Ball and Beam System Simulator

BBsnapshot

January 2008: This software was written in C++ as a preliminary study for the final project of Real Time System course at the University. The definitive simulator was then written for the real-time OS SHaRK, developed at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna of the University of Pisa.

The Ball and Beam system is a quite famous control exercise: a ball must be balanced on a beam and kept in a certain position.
The controls in the GUI are few and self-explainatory: In the Controller Gains tab, you can tweak the cascade PID controllers that allows the system to track ball position and beam angle. The default PID gain values work quite well: however, take your time to experiment.
The two check-boxes allows you to add noise to beam angle and ball position measurement, to test if the controller is robust to real world disturbances.
You can bother the controller by hitting the ball, just clicking on the bottom left button “Hit the Ball”. The two-state button “Start Controller” toggles the controller ON and OFF.
You can change the ball position set point with the slider.

Check out the Ball and Plate system I made with Arduino.