Experimental implementation of stable oscillations of the Furuta pendulum around the upward equilibrium

Abstract

Recently, a new technique for generating periodic motions in mechanical systems which have less actuators than degrees of freedom has been proposed. A motivating example for studying such motions is a dynamically stabilized walking robot, where the target trajectory is periodic, and one of the joints - the ankle joint - is unactuated, or weakly actuated. In this paper, the technique is implemented on the Furuta pendulum, an experimental testbed that is simpler than a walking robot but retains many of the key challenges - it is underactuated, open-loop unstable, and practical problems such as friction and velocity estimation must be overcome. We present a detailed description of the practical implementation of the controller. The experiments show that the technique is sufficiently robust to be useful in practice.