Force feedback assisted balancing of inverted pendulum under manual control

Human motor and cognitive behavior has been considered as an important research content and received increased attention from academia. As a suitable platform, the inverted pendulum under manual control has been studied extensively, since the inverted pendulum is essentially a nonlinear system and strong coupling exists between the human operator and pendulum system. However, performance of the system when feedback force is provided has not been reported. This paper presents a virtual pendulum system which is built based on OpenGL, while control inputs are provided with a joystick. Dynamical model has been obtained though mathematical manipulation. In order to obtain more realistic effect, dynamical model is solved with Runge-Kutta method. The joystick interface enables operators to control the pendulum manually, providing a fun experience. Comparative experiments have been carried out and the preliminary results confirm the performance difference when force/haptic information is provided to the operator. This study establishes the foundation for further research on cognitive behavior of human operators in human-machine interaction systems and neural control systems.