Intelligent Control for an Acrobot

The acrobot is an underactuated two-link planar robot that mimics the human acrobat who hangs from a bar and tries to swing up to a perfectly balanced upside-down position with his/her hands still on the bar. In this paper we develop intelligent controllers for swing-up and balancing of the acrobot. In particular, we first develop classical, fuzzy, and adaptive fuzzy controllers to balance the acrobot in its inverted unstable equilibrium region. Next, a proportional-derivative (PD) controller with inner-loop partial feedback linearization, a state-feedback, and a fuzzy controller are developed to swing up the acrobot from its stable equilibrium position to the inverted region, where we use a balancing controller to ‘catch’ and balance it. At the same time, we develop two genetic algorithms for tuning the balancing and swing-up controllers, and show how these can be used to help optimize the performance of the controllers. Overall, this paper provides (i) a case study of the development of a variety of intelligent controllers for a challenging application, (ii) a comparative analysis of intelligent vs. conventional control methods (including the linear quadratic regulator and feedback linearization) for this application, and (iii) a case study of the development of genetic algorithms for off-line computer-aided-design of both conventional and intelligent control systems.