A dual-loop control of a balance beam system

A control system has been developed to maintain the tilting angle, provided by the user, of a two-rotor single-axis mechanical apparatus. The entire control scheme consists of two feedback loops. The inner loop regulates the rotational speed to one of the rotors, while the outer loop controls the tilting angle of the mechanical beam. The inner-loop controller was designed through pole-placement based on the mathematical model of the motor. The outer-loop controller was developed by using the rule-based modeling techniques with the control gains selected through experimentation and analysis of the system response. The controller was implemented in Simulink; and the response of the system yielded a minimal steady state error with a reasonable settling time for the application under various load and input angle conditions.