Camera as Position Sensor for a Ball and Beam Control System

Authors

  • Alejandro Israel Barranco Gutiérrez Instituto Tecnológico de Celaya
  • Jesús Alberto Sandoval Galarza Instituto Tecnológico de La Paz
  • Saúl Martínez Díaz Instituto Tecnológico de La Paz

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.13053/cys-19-2-1931

Keywords:

Computer vision, ball and beam system, linear control.

Abstract

This paper describes a novel strategy to use a digital camera as a position sensor to control a ball and beam system. A linear control law is used to position the ball at the desired location on the beam. The experiments show how this method controls the positioning of the ball in any location on the beam using a camera with a sampling rate of 30 frames per second (fps), and these results are compared with those using an analog resistive sensor with a feedback signal sampled at rate 1000 samples per second. The mechanical characteristics of this ball and beam system are used to simplify the calculation of the ball position using our vision system, and in order to easy camera calibration with respect to the ball and beam system. Our proposal use circularity feature of blobs in a binary image, instead of the classic correlation or Hough transform techniques for ball’s tracking. The main control system is implemented in Simulink with Real Time Workshop (RTW) and the vision processing with OpenCV libraries.

Author Biographies

Alejandro Israel Barranco Gutiérrez, Instituto Tecnológico de Celaya

Alejandro Israel Barranco Gutiérrez received his B.Sc. degree in Telematics Engineering at UPIITA, as well as his M.Sc. and Ph. D degrees in Advanced Technology from CICATA-Legaria of Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Distrito Federal, México in 2003, 2006, and 2010, respectively. In 2008, he became professor in the Department of Mechatronics at Instituto Tecnológico de Tláhuac. In 2012 he joined to the Computational systems master program at Instituto Tecnológico de La Paz as postdoctoral researcher. From 2014, he is researcher at Instituto Tecnológico de Celaya. His fields of interest are: Computer Vision, Machine Learning and Robotics.

Jesús Alberto Sandoval Galarza, Instituto Tecnológico de La Paz

Jesús Alberto Sandoval Galarza was born in Mazatlan, Mexico, in 1971. He received the B.S. degree in Electric Engineering from the Instituto Tecnologico de Culiacan, Mexico, and the Ph. D. degree in automatic control from the Universidad Autonoma de Baja California, Mexico, in 1993 and 2010, respectively. He is a professor at the Instituto Tecnologico de La Paz, Mexico. His research interest include automatic control and mechatronics.

Saúl Martínez Díaz, Instituto Tecnológico de La Paz

Saúl Martínez-Díaz received his MSc degree in Computational Systems from Instituto Tecnológico de La Paz, (México) in 2005 and his Doctor in Computer Science degree from Centro de Investigación Científica y de Educación Superior de Ensenada (México) in (2008). He is currently Professor-Researcher at Instituto Tecnológico de La Paz (México). His research interests include image processing and pattern recognition.

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Published

2015-06-01

Issue

Vol. 19 No. 2 (2015): 19(2) April-June 2015

Section

Articles

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