Two degrees of freedom fractional controller design: Application to the ball and beam system

Control engineers and researchers face challenges to design an efficient controller for Ball and beam system due to its nonlinear and unstable properties. This paper investigates two Degrees of Freedom fractional order control of the ball and beam system. It involves the model based method to design controllers’ parameters for the corresponding linear model. The fractional order controllers are specially tuned to have a constant phase margin of the open-loop. This characteristic ensures the robustness of the controllers to the variations of system gain. This paper presents a proper evaluation and comparison between integer and fractional order controllers. Performance of each controller is evaluated in terms of set-point tracking, disturbance rejection, and robustness. The comparison between two controllers is validated through both simulation and experimental results. Strengths and weaknesses in the real-time control are also indicated.