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Control of the Ball and Beam using Kalman Filter - A Flatness Based Approach

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 Anais do XX Congresso Brasileiro de Automática
Belo Horizonte, MG, 20 a 24 de Setembro de 2014

CONTROL OF THE BALL AND BEAM USING KALMAN FILTER - A FLATNESS BASED
APPROACH

J OSÉ O NIRAM DE AQUINO L IMAVERDE F ILHO∗, E UGÊNIO L IBORIO F EITOSA F ORTALEZA∗

∗
GRACO - Grupo de Automação e Controle
Universidade de Brasília
Brasília, Distrito Federal, Brasil

Emails: joseoniram@ieee.org, efortaleza@unb.br

Abstract— The tracking control design problem for a nonlinear ball and beam system is addressed. In this paper, the flatness
property of the system is here exploited for design a state feedback control scheme aiming to stabilize the system’s trajectory
tracking error with respect to off-line planned trajectories. Differentially flat nonlinear systems can be written in the Brunovsky
canonical form, which allows to perform the state estimation using the Kalman filter. In order to validate the performance of the
proposed tracking control, numerical simulations and experimental results are presented and discussed.

Keywords— Trajectory Tracking; Nonlinear Control; Differentially Flat Systems; Kalman Filter; Ball and Beam

Resumo— O problema de rastreamento de trajetória para um sistema não-linear barra-esfera é apresentado. Nesse trabalho,
a planicidade diferencial do sistema é explorada tanto para desenvolver uma estrutura de controle por realimentação de estados
visando estabilizar o erro de rastreamento de trajetória com respeito as trajetórias desejadas. Sistemas não-lineares diferencialmente
planos podem ser escritos na sua forma canônica de Brunovsky, o que se permite realizar a estimação de estados através do
Filtro de Kalman. Buscando avaliar a performance do controlador de rastreamento proposto, simulações numéricas e resultados
experimentais são apresentados e discutidos.

Palavras-chave— Rastreamento de Trajetória; Controle Não-linear; Sistemas Diferencialmente Planos; Filtro de Kalman; Barra-
Esfera

1 Introduction first proposed and developed in (Fliess et al., 1992).

Control of underactuated systems, which is de-
fined as the one with fewer controls inputs than de-
grees of freedom, is currently an active research field
due to its theoretical challenges and their broad appli-
cation in Robotics, Aerospace Vehicles, and Marine
Vehicles (Olfati-Saber, 2001). The motivation for the
study of controllers for this systems is due the fact it
allows us to reduce weight and cost as well as con-
sider situations in which component failures can oc-
cur (Reyhanoglu, 1996).
Belonging to the class of underactuated systems,
the ball and beam system is one of the most popular
and important benchmarks system for studying non-
linear control design. This system is widely used be-
cause of its simplicity to understand as a system and
provides the opportunity to analyze the control tech-
niques (Amjad et al., 2010).
Many classical and modern control methods have
been proposed to solve both stabilization and tracking
problems for the ball and beam system. In (Hauser
et al., 1992), an approximate feedback linearization is
proposed to resolve the fact the relative degree of the
ball and beam system is not well defined. A Linear
Quadratic Regulator (LQR) was developed in (Rahmat
and Wahab, 2000) as an optimal control strategy con-
sidering the voltage of the motor as the input of the
system. In (Chang et al., 2012), a tracking control
strategy is designed using a pair of decoupled fuzzy
sliding-mode controllers.
Besides these techniques, tracking control ap-
proaches based on differential flatness have grown
substantially in recent years. Flatness property was
This property allows a complete parametrization of
all systems variables (states, inputs, outputs) in terms
of a finite set of independent variables, called the
flat outputs, and a finite number of their time deriva-
tives (Sira-Ramírez and Agrawal, 2004).
Indeed, many physical systems are known to be
differentially flat, as can be seen in (Murray et al.,
1995). These systems can be directly linearize to a
controllable linear system in Brunovsky’s canonical
form by endogenous transformation. This feature al-
lows to trivialize the trajectory planning tasks, without
solving differential equations, while simplifying the
feedback controller design problem to that of a set of
decoupled linear time invariant systems (Sira-Ramírez
and Agrawal, 2004).
The power of flatness is precisely that it does not
convert nonlinear systems into linear ones. When a
system is flat, it is an indication that the nonlinear
structure of the system is well characterized and one
can exploit that structure in designing control algo-
rithms for motion planning, trajectory generation, and
stabilization (Martin et al., 2012).
In (Rouchon et al., 1992), it was presented that
a ball and beam system used in (Hauser et al., 1992)
is non-differentially flat system, but a high frequency
control and averaging approach is proposed to approx-
imate the system by means of a flat system. In (Sira-
Ramírez, 2000), an approximate flat system is ob-
tained by disregarding the centripetal force of the ball.
The flatness property allowed to compute a suitable
off-line trajectory planning and designed an incremen-
tal time-varying linear feedback controller.
Using differential flatness theory, this paper pro-

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 Anais do XX Congresso Brasileiro de Automática
Belo Horizonte, MG, 20 a 24 de Setembro de 2014

poses a different control approach for trajectory track- respectively. Furthermore, R is the radius of the ball, g
ing of the flat nonlinear ball and beam system pre- is the acceleration due to gravity, rarm is the distance
sented in (Sira-Ramírez, 2000). Transforming the between screw and motor gear. The system input is
nonlinear system to the Brunovsky’s canonical form, given by the voltage of the motor Vm .
one can design a feedback control law based on Let (x1 , x2 , x3 , x4 )T = (r, ṙ, θ, θ̇)T . The sys-
the flat output ensuring convergence of the track- tem (1) can be represented by the following state space
ing error to zero. In addition, following the results equations:
in (Rigatos, 2012), state estimation of the flat output 
and its time derivatives is performed by applying the 

 ẋ1 = x2
standard Kalman Filter recursion to the equivalent lin- 
ẋ2 = Kbb sin(x3 )

ear system. (2)
The paper is organized as follows. The mathe- 

 ẋ 3 = x 4

matical model describing the dynamics of a nonlinear 
ẋ = β x + β V
4 1 4 2 m
ball and beam model is introduced in Section 2. In
Section 3, a brief mathematical description of differ- where
entially flat systems is given. The flatness property of 1
β1 = −
the system is used to determine the nominal trajecto- τ
ries for all system variables. Then, the steps to derive K1
the tracking controller is presented. Section 4 contains β2 = (3)
τ
the state estimation procedure for the associated lin-
mrarm gR2
earized system by applying Kalman Filter. The perfor- Kbb = .
mance of the proposed controller is evaluated through Lbeam (mR2 + Jb )
numerical simulations and experimental tests in Sec-
tion 5. The conclusions and suggestions for further 3 Differentially Flat Systems
research are presented in the last section.
Differentially flat system is a system whose inte-
gral curves (curves that satisfy the system equations)
2 Ball and Beam Model
can be mapped in a one-to-one way to ordinary curves
(which need not satisfy any differential equation) in a
suitable space, whose dimension is equal to the num-
ber of input vector (Lévine, 2010).
More precisely, the flatness condition reduce to
find a set of specific variables such that all states and
inputs can be parametrize from these outputs and their
derivatives without integration. If a nonlinear system
ẋ = f (x, u) has states x ∈ Rn , and inputs u ∈ Rm ,
then the system is said to be differentially flat, if there
exists a flat outputs z ∈ Rm such that:

z = H(x, u, u̇, · · · , u(n) ) (4)

x = α(x, ẋ, · · · , x(n) ) (5)

u = λ(x, ẋ, · · · , x(n) , x(n+1) ) (6)

Figure 1: Schematic of the ball and beam system. where the components are differentially independent
and two functions α and λ are smooth functions.
The nonlinear model for the ball and beam system
considered in this paper was presented in (Quanser,
3.1 Off-line Trajectory Planning
2008). The mathematical model of the system, illus-
trated in Figure 1, is given by: Equation (4) implies that, if we want to construct
a trajectory whose x(0) and u(0) are known, one
mrarm gR2

r̈
 = sin(θ) can find the initial and final values of the flat out-
 Lbeam (mR2 + Jb ) puts and their time derivatives by the surjectivity of
(1)
 1 K1 (α, λ). Thus, it suffices then to construct a trajectory
θ̈ = − θ̇ +

τ Vm t 7−→ z(t) at least n + 1 times differentiable that sat-
isfies these initial and final conditions since x(t) and
where θ and r are the beam angle and the ball position, u(t) are obtained by (5) and (6) (Lévine, 2010).
respectively. Also, τ is the time-constant, K1 is the Knowing the system (2) is found to be differen-
steady-state gain, Lbeam is the length of the beam, m tially flat with flat output represented by the ball po-
and Jb are the mass and moment of inertia of the ball, sition x1 , the differential parametrization associated

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 Anais do XX Congresso Brasileiro de Automática
Belo Horizonte, MG, 20 a 24 de Setembro de 2014

with the flat output and its time derivatives is given Then, initially, assume that the state vector xT can
by: be measured. If the nominal trajectories for the x1
and its time derivatives are known, we can denote by
e = x1 − x∗1 (t) the tracking error. An endogenous dy-
x2 = ẋ1 (7) namic feedback can be computed for the system (15)
  as follows (Lévine, 2010):
ẍ1
x3 = arcsin (8)
Kbb 3
X
(3)
υ = υ∗ + k(i+1) e(i) (17)
x1 i=0
x4 = 1/2 (9)
ẍ2

Kbb 1 − 12 ∗(4)
where υ ∗ = x1 and the gains ki being chosen such
Kbb
that the polynomial p(s) = s4 +k4 s3 +k3 s2 +k2 s+k1
2 (4) (3) are Hurwitz polynomials. The tracking error e con-
[Kbb − ẍ21 ]x1 + ẍ1 (x1 )2
3/2 − β 1 x4 verges to 0, which implies convergence of the flat out-
ẍ21

3
Kbb 1 − 2 put and all its time derivatives to their respective nom-
Kbb inal trajectories. Thus, from (5) and (6), we conclude
Vm = (10)
β2 that the x1 , x2 , x3 , x4 and Vm locally exponentially
converge to their reference.
Thus, it means that we can directly obtain the
nominal trajectories x∗2 (t), x∗3 (t), x∗4 (t) and Vm∗ (t) if From (11), the final expression therefore for
x∗1 (t) and its time derivatives are known. It should Vm (t) is given by replacing (17) in (10).
be emphasized that (8) is only valid when ẍ1 /Kbb be-
longs to the domain of the function arcsin, and that (9) 4 Kalman Filter for Nonlinear Flat Systems
and (10) present singularities when ẍ21 = Kbb 2
.
All state variables usually cannot be measured in
3.2 A Trajectory Tracking Feedback Controller many control applications, therefore, state estimators
As immediate consequence of the differential can be a practical or economical alternative solution.
parametrization, the system (2) can be transformed in For linear systems subject to Gaussian measurement
the Brunovsky’s canonical form (Rigatos, 2012): or process noise, the Kalman Filter (KF) provides an
efficient computational (recursive) solution for state
(4) estimation using a predictive-corrective structure. Fig-
x1 = υ = f (xT ) + g(xT )Vm (11)
ure 2 illustrates a classic discrete-time Kalman Filter.
with
h i
(3)
xT = x1 ẋ1 ẍ1 x1 (12)
3/2
ẍ2

(3)
3
β1 x4 Kbb 1 − 12 − ẍ1 [x1 ]2
Kbb
f (xT ) = 2 − ẍ2 ] (13)
[Kbb 1
3/2
ẍ21

3
β2 Kbb 1− 2
Kbb
g(xT ) = 2 − ẍ2 ] (14)
[Kbb 1
Figure 2: Schematic diagram of the discrete-time
It means that system (2) is equivalent to a fourth Kalman Filter (Bishop and Welch, 2001).
order chain of integrators with the state vector xT con-
taining the flat output and its time derivatives.
where the matrices Q and R correspond to the pro-
Thus, the linear system (11) can be written in
cess and measurement noise covariance matrices, re-
state-space representation:
spectively. For further details, refer to (Bishop and
ẋT = AxT + Bυ Welch, 2001).
(15) For nonlinear systems such as ball and beam sys-
y = CxT tem, the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) is commonly
used for obtaining estimates of the state vector through
with
the fusion of observed measurements. Although EKF
     
0 1 0 0 0 1 is efficient in several sensorless control, it is charac-
0 0 1 0 0 0 terized by cumulative errors due to the local lineariza-
A=  , B =   , C T =   (16)
     
tion assumption, and this may affect the accuracy of
0 0 0 1 0 0
the state estimation or even risk the stability of the
0 0 0 0 1 0 observer-based control loop (Rigatos, 2012).

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 Anais do XX Congresso Brasileiro de Automática
Belo Horizonte, MG, 20 a 24 de Setembro de 2014

In (Rigatos, 2012), it is proposed a derivative-free
KF based on the differential flatness theory. For non-
linear flat systems, state estimation of the flat output
and its time derivatives is performed by applying the
standard Kalman Filter recursion to the equivalent lin-
ear model in Brunovsky’s canonical form without the
need for calculation of Jacobian matrices. In contrast
to EKF, this method improves the accuracy of state
estimation for nonlinear system avoiding linearization
approximations.
Based on that, for the ball and beam system, it
allowed us to estimate the state vector xT of the lin-
ear system (15), which is used to compute the tracking
controller described by the schematic shown in (17).
The control design using KF therefore can be summa-
rized in Figure 3.
where the second trajectory starts at −0.1 m and ends
at 0.1 m after 50 seconds. For each trajectory, the cor-
responding nominal trajectories for x∗2 (t), x∗3 (t), x∗4 (t)
and Vm∗ (t) were directly computed by (7-10).
From (Quanser, 2008), the ball and beam param-
eters were Lbeam = 0.4255 m, rarm = 0.0254 m,
R = 0.0127 m, g = 9.81 m/s2 , m = 0.064 kg,
Jb = 4.129 × 10−6 kg · m2 , K1 = 1.5286 rad/sV
and τ = 0.0248 s.
The initial conditions for the system were set as:
x1 (0) = −0.2125 m x2 (0) = 0 m/s
(20)
x3 (0) = −0.9774 rad x4 (0) = 0 rad/s
The control parameters were chosen to be:
k4 = 20 k3 = 150 k2 = 500 k1 = 625 (21)

where all closed-loop poles are equal to -5.

The ball velocity and beam angular velocity are
estimated by the KF described in Section 4. Using a
sampling period Ts = 0.001s, the discrete-model of
Figure 3: Tracking control design for the ball and the system (15) can be represented as follows:
beam system.
xT (k+1) = Ak xT (k) + Bk υk (22)

5 Simulation and Experimental Results with

Ak = exp(ATs ) (23)
The experimental apparatus is a Quanser ball and
beam as can be seen in Figure 4. The beam consists Bk = BTs (24)
of a metal beam with a built in potentiometer sensor
that detects the ball role along the beam and its posi- Then, the matrices Q and R were defined as:
tion, whereas an encoder is used to measure the beam  
angle. By applying a torque at the end of the beam, 0.1 0 0 0  
 0 0.1 0 0
an DC servomotor drives the beam to a desired angle. Q=  , R = 0.01 0
0 0 0.1 0  0 0.01
Furthermore, input saturation was added to the system.
0 0 0 0.1
(25)

Figures (5-6) and (8-9) depicts the ball position

and beam angle for constant and polynomial trajec-
tory, respectively. The time evolution of the control
inputs is shown in Figure 7 and Figure 10.
Both simulations show the ball and beam sys-
tem perfectly following the trajectories specified pre-
viously, thereby ensuring that the tracking errors con-
verging to zero as expected. Then, it allows us to val-
idate the tracking controller in the Quanser ball and
Figure 4: Ball and beam system setup
beam.
Numerical simulations were initially carried out 0.15
Ball Position

Reference
to validate the performance of the proposed tracking 0.1 Ball Position

controller for two different set-points: 0.05

0
I) Constant Trajectory
R [m]

−0.05

−0.1

x∗1 (t) = 0 (18) −0.15

−0.2
II) Polynomial Trajectory −0.25
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50
t [s]

x∗1 (t) = (1.2 × 10−10 )t5 − (3 × 10−8 )t4

Figure 5: Ball position for constant trajectory.
+ (2 × 10−6 )t3 − 0.1 (19)

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 Anais do XX Congresso Brasileiro de Automática
Belo Horizonte, MG, 20 a 24 de Setembro de 2014

Beam Angle
1
Reference
By using the same control parameters previ-
Beam Angle
ously defined, experimental tests were carried out for
0.5
x∗1 (t) = −0.05 m, x∗1 (t) = 0 m and x∗1 (t) = 0.05 m.
θ [rad]
Figures (11-13) present the ball position for each de-
0
sired trajectory.
−0.5
Ball Position

Reference
−1 0.2
Ball Position
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50
t [s]
0.1

Figure 6: Beam angle for constant trajectory.

R [m]
0

−0.1
Input Signal
10
Reference
8 Input Signal −0.2

6 0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 450 500

4
t [s]
Vm [V]

0
Figure 11: Performance of the tracking control for
x∗1 (t) = −0.05 m.
−2

−4

−6

−8
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50
t [s] Ball Position
Reference
0.2
Ball Position
Figure 7: Input signal for constant trajectory.
R [m] 0.1

Ball Position
0.15 0
Reference
0.1 Ball Position
−0.1
0.05

0 −0.2
R [m]

−0.05
0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 450 500
−0.1 t [s]

−0.15

−0.2 Figure 12: Performance of the tracking control for

−0.25
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 x∗1 (t) = 0 m.
t [s]

Figure 8: Ball position for polynomial trajectory. Ball Position

Reference
0.2
Ball Position
Beam Angle
1
Reference 0.1
Beam Angle
R [m]

0.5 0
θ [rad]

0 −0.1

−0.2
−0.5
0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 450 500
t [s]
−1
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50
t [s]
Figure 13: Performance of the tracking control for
Figure 9: Beam angle for polynomial trajectory. x∗1 (t) = 0.05 m.

10
Input Signal
As it can be seen, the proposed controller has a
Reference
8
Input Signal good performance for all three cases. The main con-
6 trol design issue is choosing appropriate values for the
4 gains of the closed-loop controller, since it was real-
Vm [V]

2 ized that the state estimation is directly influenced by

0 their values.
−2

−4
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 6 Conclusions
t [s]

In this work, a nonlinear ball and beam model is

Figure 10: Input signal for polynomial trajectory.
presented as differentially flat. This property immedi-
ately allows to establish the equivalence of the model,
by means of dynamic state feedback, a controllable

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 Anais do XX Congresso Brasileiro de Automática
Belo Horizonte, MG, 20 a 24 de Setembro de 2014
linear system in Brunovsky’s canonical form. Precom-
puting the necessary off-line trajectory, the approach
is based on showing a systematic feedback controller
design to converge trajectory tracking error to zero ex-
ponentially.
Unlike other estimation methods, it was shown
that Kalman Filter can be apply in nonlinear flat
systems avoiding linearization approximations, which
improves the accuracy of estimation of the system
state variables. Numerical simulations and experimen-
tal tests illustrates the validity of the designed motion
planning and tracking control scheme for different tra-
jectories.
In further studies, we expect to propose a flatness-
based controller design for the ball and beam sys-
tem assuming the influence of centrifugal force term,
which implies that the system is no longer flat. How-
ever, a new approach based on the concept of flat in-
puts could be used to redesign the input vector field of
the system such that the given output becomes the flat
output, and allows to use the method discussed here.
Acknowledgment
The authors would like to acknowledge the
Brazilian institutions: ANP, FINEP, MCT and Petro-
bras for supporting the present study and the program
PRH-PB 223.
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