Magnet Balancer
For my final project for my linear controls course, I worked on a two-person team to balance a magnet by controlling an electromagnet directly above it.
In order to accomplish this goal, we had to linearize the system. However, since my partner and I had decided to attempt to balance a very small magnet, we determined that linearizing the magnetic field wouldn't give us adequate results, due to the instability of our starting system. Therefore, we ended up defining the force of the magnet outside of the system we were controlling by fitting a curve to experimental force data, and keeping the distances in the system we were controlling. This method got us very close to being successful, but in the end, we determined that we should have balanced a larger magnet, which would have made the system without the controller much less unstable.