Erecting and Balancing of the Inverted Pendulum by an Industrial Robot

This article presents the implementation of the well known inverted pendulum together with an industrial robot. The inverted pendulum is an adequate control system to demonstrate improved control algorithms. Regarding this system there are more restrictions in comparison with the pendulum mounted on a linear drive, e.g., lower acceleration, smaller traversing range and the relatively high cycle time of the commercial robot controller which was used. In this paper the dynamic equations of the pendulum together with to robot are presented. Then two control algorithms are designed, one for erecting the pendulum by coordinated robot motions, and one for balancing the pendulum in the upper position based on a state space controller with additional feature of zero point offset adaptation. The approaches were implemented into the robot controller and verified with the real system.