The development of fundamental teaching materials and the inverted pendulum system as advanced sequence control

In modern society, learning sequence control techniques is essential for engineers since apparatus using sequence control is used in various fields. Therefore, we developed some teaching materials of sequence control for international students and students in our college. Relay sequential control is the subject matter in these materials for beginners, because it is the foundation of sequence control. The purpose of manufacturing the materials is to enable students to understand the foundations of sequential circuits. Next, as an advanced step-up course of fundamental teaching materials, we developed new teaching materials whose subject is inverted-pendulum system. The controlled object is controlled based on the position information from the potentiometer, and the pendulum is kept upright as the cart moves by the electrical signal the controller generates. Therefore, the objective of this inverted-pendulum system is to keep pendulum standing upright. The purpose of developing this teaching material is to enable students to understand sequence control using PLC-sequence control. This advanced teaching material will be used for lectures in our college and visiting lectures in overseas partner universities. At present, we are testing the inverted pendulum system, but we can only keep it standing for one second. The reasons why we cannot keep pendulum standing may be: moving velocity of the ball-screw-stage is too slow and oscillation period of the pendulum is too short. We will consider how to solve these problems.