Evaluation of Experimental Implementations of Optimal Controllers for Underactuated Systems

Inverted pendulum control systems are widely employed benchmarking purposes as they offer similar challenges to those faced when designing controllers for underactuated systems. In this paper, an LQR-based control system consisting of an inverted pendulum on a cart is presented and used in a comparative experimental study on hardware controller implementation. The paper focuses on studying, comparing, and evaluating the performance of two options of controller implementations ranging from a low-cost microcontroller based embedded system, namely the Arduino DUE, to a relatively high-end, high-cost controller prototyping system, the dSpace DS1104. Derivation of the modeling equations of motion of the inverted pendulum on a cart based on the Lagrangian formulation is also presented