Controller design and realization for a novel inverted pendulum

Because of their inherently unstable and highly nonlinear dynamics, inverted pendulums have been widely employed to verify various control strategies. Popular inverted pendulum schemes include: the car-pole pendulum, ball-and-beam system, Pendubot, Acrobot, Furuta pendulum and the inertia wheel pendulum. Each has received considerable attention in the field of control system research. In contrast to these previous schemes, this paper proposes a novel inverted pendulum, referred to as a weight-balancing inverted pendulum. First, the structure of the inverted pendulum is presented, and its mathematical model is derived using Lagrange's approach. In order to obtain a mathematic model of normal form for controller design, the system output is redefined, and the original model transformed. Using this model, two nonlinear control schemes are applied to designing this new inverted pendulum. These non-linear control schemes are based on the well-known backstepping design approach to obtain nonlinear controllers that guarantee system stability. These control schemes are practically implemented in the design of this inverted pendulum in order to investigate their effectiveness.