Event-triggered Control of a Hung-type Ball and Beam System

This paper considers an event-triggered LQ control of a hung-type ball-and-beam (HTBB) system via wireless communication. In this HTBB system, the beam angle is controlled by winding the wire. Unfortunately, due to gravity, the beam's angular acceleration cannot be greater than its free-fall acceleration. In addition, discontinuous changes in the beam angle sometimes cause centrifugal force. To solve this problem, we introduce two integrators in the front of the HTBB system. It makes it possible to render the angular acceleration continuous and small in the sense of LQ optimization. Although the event-triggering mechanism (ETM) reduces the number of communications, it may cause unnecessary updates of the control input. Therefore, this paper proposes a method to avoid this issue by introducing a dead-zone to the ETM. Several experiments are explored to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method.