Pneumatic Balancing Mechanisms in Control Education.

The paper presents three balancing mechanisms, which have been utilized as experimental systems in the control education of mechanical engineering students. Their uniqueness is the pneumatic drive, which makes them more affordable, simpler and more interesting to control. These balancing mechanisms are the inverted pendulum, the inverted wedge and the ball and beam, while the pneumatic infrastructure includes a variety of valves. This paper describes these experimental systems and some methods applied to control them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]