Internal Model Control of underactuated mechanical systems, application to the inertia wheel inverted pendulum

In this paper, an application of internal model control (IMC) on an underactuated system who is the inertia wheel inverted pendulum that exhibits unstable dynamics. The structure of the IMC has two nested controllers. The first controller ensures the stabilization of the system. The second controller ensures the tracking of reference trajectories. The simulation results are very satisfactory in terms of stability, accuracy and speed. The obtained controller is simple, is easy to implement in real time and presents good control and robustness performances.