Adaptive intelligent cascade control of a ball-riding robot for optimal balancing and station-keeping

Abstract This paper presents an adaptive intelligent cascade control strategy to maintain the dynamic stability of a ball-riding robot (BRR). The four-wheeled mechanism beneath the robot body balances it on a spherical wheel. The BRR is modeled as a combination of two decoupled inverted pendulums. Therefore, two independent controllers are used to control its pitch and roll rotations. An incremental proportional–integral–derivative (PID) is implemented in the inner loop of the cascade to maintain the vertical balance. A generic PD controller is used in the outer loop to keep the station by controlling its spatial position. The controller parameters are automatically tuned via a fuzzy adaptation mechanism. The centers of fuzzy output membership functions are dynamically updated via an extended Kalman filter (EKF). The proposed controller quickly responds to changes in system’s state and effectively rejects the exogenous disturbances. The results of real-time experiments are presented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid controller over the conventional classical controllers.