Web-based Control Laboratory: The Ball and Beam System

This paper presents a Web-based control laboratory of a non-linear and unstable system: the ball and beam plant. Different control strategies, apart from the traditional PID, as Robust, Fuzzy and PD-Reset Control have been taken to give students a wider vision of control approaches. The client-side of the virtual laboratory has been developed using EJS (Easy Java Simulations), an open-source tool that allows creating Java applications easily. Meanwhile, the application that locally interacts with the system is written in LabVIEW. Different experiences are presented showing the advantages of advanced control strategies over PD control.