Visual Feedback Balance Control of a Robot Manipulator and Ball-Beam System

In this paper, we present a vision guided robotic ball-beam balancing control system, consisting of a robot manipulator (actuator), a ball-beam system (plant) and a machine vision system (feedback). The machine vision system feedbacks real-time beam angle and ball position data at a speed of 50 frames per second. Based on feedback data, the end-effector of a robot manipulator is driven to control the ball position by maneuvering of the inclination angle of the ball-beam system. The overall control system is implemented with two FPGA chips, one for machine vision processing, and one for robot joints servo PID controllers as well as ball position PD controller. Experiments are performed on a 5-axes robot manipulator to validate the proposed ball beam balancing control system.