3D Pendulum Swinging Control by an Industrial Robot Manipulator

In this paper a pendulum of two degrees of freedom is investigated, i.e. a spherical pendulum which is attached to the end effector of an industrial robot manipulator. The result of the presented research is a controllable transport of the pendulum in all three dimensions. That means a real time control of the pendulum during all the time of the transport and a stable reaction of suddenly changing circumstances. The mathematical model has been derived due to the Lagrangian mechanics without consideration of the external forces. The position of the pendulum is observed with an USB camera which is also attached to the end effector and follows the motion of the manipulator. The analysis of the images taken by the USB camera provides an estimation of the current position of the pendulum and builds the input of the controller. For the first the experimental setup, the mathematical model and the controller are explained and then some experimental results are presented.