Developing a Convenient Balance Beam for Unknown Loads

Balance beam, a controller that is built adopting the gyro effect, can freely control the attitude of an unstructured object by means of the position controlling of an inner gimbal. However in the former research, the weight (inertia) of a load should be known to issue a proper command for the gimbal, which makes it hard to operate the balance beam in field applications because the load can be changed frequently and, moreover, the inertia of the same load could be different according to how the load is held. Therefore an accident could be caused by the operation with an improper gimbal command.

One of the possible approaches to solve the problem is to give a balance beam controller an ability to detect the inertia of a load so that it can limit the velocity of the load ordered by a user. In this paper, we designed a controller that can estimate the inertia of the load based on the result we did before; the fact that when there is smaller inertia of load, the larger amount of the restoration displacement occurs. Thus, the load could be identified by issuing a predefined command to measure the amount of the restoration displacement, which makes us able to construct the controller that can limit the angular velocity of the load by planning the motion. Experimental results show the performance of the controller with some loads.