Design and development of a low-cost inverted pendulum for control education

This paper describes the design and development of a low-cost inverted pendulum device for purposes of control education. The device is based on a modular construction in the form of assembly kit. The individual parts can be made of laser cut fiberboard or any appropriate material. The pendulum uses a stepper motor as the actuator for cart movement and rotary encoders for sensing the angle of rod and position of a cart. The main electronics used for control of motor and sensors reading is a micro-controller board with Atmel ATMega2560 8-bit MCU. The paper also describes the principles of operation of the device, along with the communication and external control interface written in MATLAB. The MATLAB command line interface contains a set of simple functions for signal acquisition and control of the main actuator in terms of position, velocity and acceleration. Students can use these to incorporate the device into their own operation algorithms and control scenarios. For educational purposes, the paper also deals with the mathematical modeling of the system and its simplifications that can be applied in the case of stepper motor usage.