Development of Hybrid Controller for An Affordable Cart-Pole System

A cart-pole system has been a common plant for benchmarking control algorithms because of its non-linear, under-actuated and unstable nature. The pole (or pendulum) alone can exhibit various interesting behaviors ranging from simple harmonic motion to chaotic dynamics in the case of a multi-link pendulum. The cart in a cart-pole system is the actuated component, providing a way to manipulate the pendulum by applying a control force to move the cart horizontally. In this paper, only the generic single-link-inverted-pendulum-on-a-cart is considered. The main goal of this study is to illustrate methods that can effectively model the dynamics and design a hybrid control strategy for a single-inverted-pendulum-on-a-cart system. Moreover, this paper also presents a useful workflow for not only constructing the physical system, but also implementing a control law in a cart-pole plant without the help of expensive hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) devices.