Vision Algorithms for Ball on Beam and Plate

The ball-and-beam process is one of the most famous control laboratory processes [1]. At the Department of Automatic Control at Lund Institute of Technology a light-weight ballandbeam process has been made portable by implementing the controls on a laptop with a webcam. The main contribution of this master thesis was the testing and implementation of a variety of vision-based algorithms used to localize the beam, the ball on it and calculate the angle of the beam. A soft-real-time controller was also implemented which used the camera sampling period. Identification of gestures was used to set reference points on the beam. For further testing of the algorithms a ball-on-plate process was implemented using an IRB2400 6-axis robot, using hard-real-tim