Autonomous Stair Climbing of a Wheeled Double Inverted Pendulum

The described wheeled double inverted pendulum was built to serve as a stair-climbing device (SCD). It can negotiate steps autonomously. The overall SCD model is represented by a hybrid automaton. It consists of nonlinear situation-changing continuous-time properties. Depending on the situation, the SCD is either fully actuated or under-actuated. Furthermore, discontinuous phenomena exist due to wheel-to-ground unilateral constraints. Feedback linearization is used as a basis for the control design. Due to a different situation-changing relative degree a full-state linearization or a partial linearization is applied. The state transition “settling” is developed within the virtual constraints framework.