Development of circular-rail double inverted pendulum control platform with robust control

The circular-rail double inverted pendulum is considered as a strongly nonlinear system. In this paper, the mathematical model of the inverted pendulum is established based on the principle of theoretical mechanics. And based on the analysis of characteristics of the inverted pendulum, the robust Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) control strategy is adopted to design control system. In order to get the optimal performance, the parameters of Q and R are selected based on generic algorithm which possesses global search and optimization performance. In order to facilitate the expansion and visualization, the original control program written in C language and ran in the DOS platform is improved and reprogrammed in Visual Studio 2008 where the control function is realized in interrupt service routine which is called every 5ms. The performance of the circular-rail double inverted pendulum is validated under the platform, and the effectiveness of the control strategies and the experimental platform are confirmed.