Implementation of a Ball and Plate Control System Using Sliding Mode Control

In this paper, we propose a cost-effective implementation method of a ball and plate system as an educational kit and present the application of sliding mode control to achieve better control performance. We choose a Stewart platform with rotary actuators to manipulate the plate. We explain the construction method of the platform in detail. We use a touch panel as a sensor to obtain the positional data at a high sample rate and to make the system compact. As a main control unit, we use a Nucleo-32 board, which is a small and powerful open source hardware with a built-in floating point unit. For controller synthesis, we show a mathematical model of the ball and plate system and explain the kinematics analysis of the Stewart platform. We design a sliding mode controller that includes error integration, which makes the system robust against external disturbances. We describe the results of the simulations and the experiments and then illustrate the advantage of the applied sliding mode control compared to LQ control. The proposed system is cost-effective, can be easily built, has good control performance, and occupies a small space. For these reasons, we expect that the system can be efficiently used as an educational tool.