Wide-range stabilization of an arm-driven inverted pendulum using linear parameter-varying techniques

The purpose of the paper is to demonstrate the ability of LPV (Linear Parameter Varying) control techniques to handle difficult nonlinear control problems. The focus in this paper is on the wide range stabilization of an arm-driven inverted pendulum. Two different LPV control techniques are used to design nonlinear controllers that achieve stabilization of the pendulum over the maximum range of operating conditions while providing time- and frequency-domain performances. The merits of each of these techniques are investigated and the improvements over more classical LTI (Linear Time-Invariant) control schemes such as H_∞ or μ controllers are discussed. A particular emphasis is put on the real-time implementation of these controllers for the inverted pendulum experiment. It is shown that suitable multi-objective extensions of the standard characterization of LPV controllers allow to cope with sampling rate implementation constraints. Finally, a complete validation of the proposed LPV controller structures is carried out through a set of realistic nonlinear simulations but also by means of physical experiment records.