Fuzzy sliding-mode control for ball and beam system with fuzzy ant colony optimization

This paper mainly addresses the balance control of a ball and beam system, where a pair of decoupled fuzzy sliding-mode controllers (DFSMCs) are proposed. The DFSMC has the advantage of reducing the design complexity, in which the coupling dynamics of the state-error dynamics are considered as disturbance terms. Stability analysis of the ball and beam system with DFSMCs is also discussed in detail. To further improve the control performance, an improved ant colony optimization (ACO) is proposed to optimize the controller parameters. The proposed ACO algorithm has the enhanced capability of fuzzy pheromone updating and adaptive parameter tuning. The proposed ACO-optimized scheme is utilized to tune the parameters of the fuzzy sliding-mode controllers for a real ball-and-beam system. Compared to some conventional ACO algorithms, simulation and experimental results all indicate that the proposed scheme can provide better performance in the aspect of convergence rate and accuracy. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.