Using the Taguchi methods to study the balance control of a rotary inverted pendulum

The objective of this research was to design controllers for balancing a rotary inverted pendulum. The controllers designed by the pole-placement method and the linear-quadratic regulator (LQR) method were discussed, and experiments and simulation were conducted to study the performance of the controllers. By using an L9 orthogonal array proposed in the Taguchi methods, the appropriate feedback gain used in the LQR controller can be efficiently found among 120 combinations of different feedback gains. Various lengths of the links in the rotary inverted pendulum were simulated in order to understand the relationship between the lengths of the links and feedback gains.