Design and evaluation of fuzzy PID controller for ball and beam system

Ball and beam control system is specially designed to study nonlinear control methodology on an unstable system. The point of the ball is hard to manage because it will move continuously on a beam, makes it becoming open-loop unstable. PID controller had been successfully applied for this application by previous researchers. However, incorporation of fuzzy in the system to facilitate PID tuning could basically simplify the design problem. Therefore, this paper presents an approach of fuzzy proportional integral derivative (fuzzy PID) controller for position control of ball and beam system. The effectiveness of the proposed controller was verified by simulation and compared with a PID controller obtained using auto-tuned function in Simulink Toolbox. The results from step response and input tracking show that the proposed controller had a better performance in both evaluations compared to PID.