Title :
Ball on plate balancing system for multi-discipline educational purposes
Author :
Braescu, Florin Catalin ; Ferariu, Lavinia ; Gilca, Radu ; Bordianu, Vlad
Author_Institution :
“Gheorghe Asachi” Tech. Univ. of Iasi, Iasi, Romania
Abstract :
The paper presents a ball on plate balancing system useful for various educational purposes. A touch-screen placed on the plate is used for ball´s position sensing and two servomotors are employed for balancing the plate in order to control ball´s Cartesian coordinates. The design of control embedded systems is demonstrated for different control algorithms in compliance with FreeRTOS real time operating system and dsPIC33 microcontroller. On-line visualizations useful for system monitoring are provided by a PC host application connected with the embedded application. The measurements acquired during real-time execution and the parameters of the system are stored in specific data files, as support for any desired additional analysis. Taking into account the properties of this controlled system (instability, fast dynamics) and the capabilities of the embedded architecture (diversity of the involved communication protocols, diversity of employed hardware components, usage of an open source real time operating system), this educational setup allows a good illustration of numerous theoretical and practical aspects related to system engineering and applied informatics.
Keywords :
computerised monitoring; data visualisation; embedded systems; haptic interfaces; microcontrollers; operating systems (computers); protocols; public domain software; servomotors; touch sensitive screens; FreeRTOS real-time operating system; PC host application; ball Cartesian coordinate control; ball position sensing; ball-on-plate balancing system; communication protocols; control algorithms; control embedded system design; data files; dsPIC33 microcontroller; educational purposes; embedded architecture; online visualizations; open-source real-time operating system; servomotors; system monitoring; touch-screen; Algorithm design and analysis; Microcontrollers; Protocols; Real-time systems; Servomotors; Universal Serial Bus;
Conference_Titel :
System Theory, Control and Computing (ICSTCC), 2012 16th International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Sinaia
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4673-4534-7