Lqg/ltr Controller Design for Rotary Inverted Pendulum Quanser Real-time Experiment

This experiment consists of a rigid link (pendulum) rotating in a vertical plane. The rigid link is attached to a pivot arm, which is mounted on the load shaft of a DC-motor. The pivot arm can be rotated in the horizontal plane by the DC-motor. The DC-motor is instrumented with a potentiometer. In addition, a potentiometer is mounted on the pivot arm to measure the pendulum angle. The principal objective of this experiment is to balance the pendulum in the verticalupright position and to position the pivot arm. Since the plant has two degrees of freedom but only one actuator, the system is under-actuated and exhibits significant nonlinear behavior for large pendulum excursion. Our purpose is to design a robust controller in order to realize a real-time control of the pendulum position using a Quanser PC board and power module and the appropriate WinCon real-time software. For the controller design is used a well-known robust method, called LQG/LTR (Linear Quadratic Gauss Ian/Loop Transfer Recovery) which implements an optimal statefeedback. The real-time experiment is realized in the Automatic Control laboratory.