Position and Orientation Control of a Wheeled Inverted Pendulum.

A wheeled inverted pendulum (WIP), which is unstable and nonholonomic, with two servodriven wheeles is manufactured and used to confirm the proposed method for controlling its position and orientation. First WIP control system equipped with sensors such as a piezoelectric gyro to detect the tilt angle and two semiconductor photosensing devices to obtain the position and orientation is constructed. By using a distance variable the system dynamics is decoupled and an integral type optimum regulator is built up to reduce the influence of disturbance. Algorithms are proposed to cope with the singularity problem included in the control rule. Finally the WIP is effectively controlled starting from various initial position and orientation states to a specified final state.