Abstract
This paper proposes a new contact type ball tracking sensor to improve the control performance of a low cost ball-and-beam system. It is well-known that the impulsive measurement noise contained in ball position measurement is one of the factors which severely degrades the ball-and-beam control performance. The impulsive ball position measurement noises often appear under the sporadical ball floating on the beam. This fact motivates us to devise a simple analog preprocessing circuit to determine whether the ball loses the contact or not. Once the abnormal ball position measurement is detected, the design problem of the ball tracking sensor can be cast into the typical state estimation problem with missing data. In order to tackle the real-time implementation issue, a steady-state Kalman filter is applied to the problem. Through the experimental results, the usefulness of the proposed scheme is demonstrated.