Switching control of a rotary inverted pendulum

In this paper we consider the problem of swinging-up and stabilization of a rotary inverted pendulum. We design switching controllers and analyse whether the performance can be improved using more controllers. We optimize both the control gains and the switching points. All the controllers are tested experimentally on a rotary inverted pendulum. Our results indicate that having a large number of switching controllers does not necessarily lead to a performance increase.