Design and development of a ball-plate balancing system with a smart phone human-machine interface

Technology is so ahead that sophisticated processes could be accessed and controlled by a smart phone through which human-machine interaction is made easy and taken to the next higher level. A classic example of a highly unstable non-linear mechatronic process is a ball-plate balancing system. This paper presents the mathematical model and design of a typical two axes ball-plate balancing system, where the roll and pitch of the plate is controlled by the actuation of two servo motors. An image processing algorithm acts on the video feed obtained by a vision system, to read the position of the ball on the plate in real time. A proportional-integral-derivative controller is implemented to position the ball on a desired location on the plate. A mobile application forming an intuitive human-machine interface is developed to interact, monitor and control the operation of the ball-plate balancing system. The developed system has an error of 1.29 % in positioning the ball with a settling time of about 26.4 seconds.