The development and control of a two-wheeled inverted pendulum

This paper presents the modeling and control of a nonlinear two-wheeled inverted pendulum (TWIP) system. We derive the transfer function and design robust controllers for the TWIP system. The designed controllers are implemented on MATLAB/Simulink and on a microcontroller for simulations and experiments, respectively. It is found that the single-loop feedback control structure cannot deal with the disturbances caused by the motor mechanism and environment factors. Therefore, we propose a multi-loop control architecture to achieve balancing, velocity, and position tracking control. Based on the experiment results, the control strategies are deemed effective in providing satisfactory responses with the existence of system disturbances.