Low cost experiments for control systems

Abstract

The multilateral well drilling system is a complex control system that illustrates dynamics resource allocation and decision making problems. Based on some analogies that we can draw from this system, we have developed a low cost platform that can be controlled by several control techniques. This low cost experiment consists of different fans that juggle the balls that are inside the tubes under some own restrictions associated to two different manifolds. In this paper, we have implemented different strategies to control the position of the balls inside the tubes. We show that the platform can be used to teach classical control strategies (e.g., PID controllers), as well as advanced control techniques (e.g., fuzzy logic), and non-conventional control techniques based on current research problems (e.g., social foraging theory, evolutionary game theory).