Inverted Pendulum

Located at: University of Queensland, Australia

Inverted Pendulum is a well known control theory experiment whereby control laws are derived and tweaked as to balance a pole much like one balances a broom on their finger. Students can construct models using Simulink within MATLAB on their workstation and compile and run their designs on the hardware through connection to a second machine running the xPC kernel. This machine then directly interfaces with the inverted pendulum hardware. The objective of this experiment is to write a control program that swings a pole back and forth until it is balanced. Students use MATLAB to write a control program. They then login and upload their program to the server. The experiment is run and the result datasets are collected and evaluated. The student can then revise their MATLAB control program and rerun the experiment.

As the experiment is run, data is graphed and in the upper right corner an animation of the results is displayed. On the right side of the client, a state diagram is dynamically updated to show the current state of the control program. On the left side are client display options. There is also a simple animation. This experiment consists of many iterations of design and test. Whilst the mathematical models and computer simulations may successfully balance the pendulum, the actual lab equipment's behavior is not so ideal. Students greatly benefit from working with the real equipment whilst they build their early models and perform the many tweaks online, potentially queuing up several variations at once.