AN INVERTED PENDULUM TOOL FOR TEACHING LINEAR OPTIMAL AND MODEL BASED CONTROL

Abstract

The use of the inverted pendulum experiment in teaching control theory and practice is now widely accepted in the area of control education. This paper describes an environment built upon an operating inverted pendulum suitable to design and test several linear controllers by using the well known MATLAB and its toolboxes. The environment has been designed to maximally fit to MATLAB procedures and interfaces. A significant part of the environment is a support for identification and model based control, which provides a MATLAB compatible mode to acquire data of the relevant variables and to generate disturbances with predesiglled characteristics. Some didactic examples - mainly from the field of model based conLrol are described. As the examples present, the inverted pendulum experiment is suitable to use it in teaching - beyond the conventional ones - the more contemporary topics of the control science.