Digital Control of CE 151 Ball & Plate Model

The digital control is an important aspect of today’s technologies and industrial environment. This thesis presents the digital control of an unstable Ball & Plate system from the mathematical model to real-model control. There are many different controller design approaches and the one used here is based on the minimization of linear quadratic LQ criterion for 2DOF controller structure using spectral factorization, which results in almost optimal and relatively robust controller able to provide good reference tracking and disturbance rejection. To make the reference signal selection interesting and automatic, a simple 2D maze was constructed on top of the plate. The computer automatically and algorithmically solves the maze, thus obtaining the desired trajectory of the ball. A graphical user interface was also designed to encapsulate the model control. Results shown in this thesis are promising and prove that the LQ controller is a very suitable for this model.