Wide-Range Stabilization of an Arm-Driven Inverted Pendulum Using Linear Parameter-Varying Techniques*

The purpose of the paper is to demon- strate the ability of LPV (Linear Parameter Vary- ing) control techniques to handle difficult nonlin- ear control problems. The focus in this paper is on the wide range stabilization of an arm-driven in- verted pendulum. Two different LPV control tech- niques are used to design nonlinear controllers that achieve stabilization of the pendulum over the max- imum range of operating conditions while providing time- and frequency-domain performances. The mer- its of each of these techniques are investigated and the improvements over more classical LTI (Linear Time-Invariant) control schemes such as #<» or y, controllers are discussed. A particular emphasis is put on the real-time implementation of these con- trollers for the inverted pendulum experiment. It is shown that suitable multi-objective extensions of the standard characterization of LPV controllers allow to cope with sampling rate implementation constraints. Finally, a complete validation of the proposed LPV controller structures is carried out through a set of realistic nonlinear simulations but also by means of physical experiment records.