Control of pendulum: from Super Mechano-System to Human Adaptive Mechatronics

The Super Mechano-System was the research project at the Tokyo Institute of Technology from 1997 to 2002 and the Human Adaptive Mechatronics (HAM) Project is the newly selected COE research project at Tokyo Denki University from 2003 to 2008. Both projects are sponsored by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in Japan. The author was the SMS project leader until 2000 and Prof. S. Hirose succeeded. Many mechanical systems with functions adapting to varying environment and the relating basic theory have been developed. The concurrent design method of the mechanism and controller has been developed by the control research group in the project. Human adaptive mechatronics is a system, which includes the human in the control loop and changes the functions and structure of the man-machine interface according to the improvement of the human operation skill. In this plenary lecture, the control of the multiple pendulums from the pendant to the upright position is discussed from the viewpoint of varying constraint systems. The swing-up control of pendulums is discussed by considering reachability of an unstable nonlinear system by nonlinear control. A new approach to analyse and to design a nonlinear control based on the fractal is presented. The results show that the map of the control parameters and the initial conditions give interesting results.