Design of a Digital Controller for Stabilization and Control of an Inverted Pendulum

Abstract

This project focused on the design of a digital controller using an Arduino Duemilanove ATmega168. The controller was designed for use with the Quanser inverted pendulum system. It receives two encoder inputs and outputs an amplified, analog voltage for motor control. The encoder signals are processed through encoder-tocounter converters and recorded in a series of counters. The arduino receives and processes the position values. The controller was tested with the inverted pendulum problem. It effectively stabilizes the pendulum but experiences significant signal noise and some error in position tracking. Issues of sampling rate and efficient processing are considered in the design discussion.