Triple inverted pendulum system implementation using a new ARM/FPGA control platform

The paper deals with hardware implementation of triple inverted pendulum on a cart physical model. The inverted pendulum has been very popular benchmark for teaching and research in control theory and robotics for last decades. Extending such task to double, or even triple, serial pendulum mounted on a moving cart, and control its swing-up and balancing, leads not only to a challenging control algorithm design problems. It also pushes very hard requirements to overall hardware implementation. Including precision of sensors, problems with signal transmission from moving parts, and highly dynamic backlash-free drive of the moving cart. Of course, the key part of the control system is a computer, which has enough power to run complex algorithms and which has a fast input/output system to the real physical world. We successfully designed and built a triple inverted pendulum model based on state-of-the-art technology. Feedback signals from moving parts are transmitted by custom wireless data communication system with extremely low transmission delay. Instead of using off-the-shelf prototyping platforms like dSPACE or LabVIEW, the control system is powered by our own hardware design based on the ARM/FPGA System-on-Chip platform. The paper also briefly describes architecture of controller hardware.