Comparative Analysis of Controller Strategies for Steerable Robotic Bar System

This paper presents a comparative analysis of several controllers which are frequently used in robotic systems. This research especially focuses on controlling the ball and beam system of which the characteristics are non-linear and unstable. This paper first derives the dynamics model to control the ball on the beam for balancing. Secondly, it introduces automatic tuning methods for the PID controller based on Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Sliding Mode Control (SMC). This paper introduces a cascade PID control architecture, which is designed with inner and outer feedback loops for balancing the ball on the beam. Finally, the insight of the simulation results with the conclusion is described through in terms of the quantitative comparison with the traditional controllers such as Integral of Time multiply Absolute Error (ITAE) and a Fuzzy-Logic Controller (FLC).