Automatic control and monitoring of systems is increasingly widespread and important in modern industrial environment. A good example of a control system is the control of the position of a ball on a flat surface. The movement of the ball on a tilting flat surface alone is unstable, but adding a feedback loop and a control circuit can stabilise the system. A mechanical system with three actuators was designed to control the tilt of the surface, and a touch panel was used to detect the position of the ball. For successful control, we used a PID control algorithm implemented on the Arduino DUE development board. We have mathematically modelled our system, created a block diagram and compared it with a physical system. Using MATLAB software and a block diagram, the controller parameters were determined. We have shown that even with a simplified model, we can obtain parameters that result in a stable system. The work also shows the system responses for different PID controller parameters and the responses to different input signals.
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