Pitch Balancing Control of a Flipping Two-Wheel Stair Climbing Robot

Abstract

In this research a novel design for climbing stairs has been proposed. This design can be further developed as a stair climbing wheelchair. While traveling on flat surfaces, this mechanism uses two wheeled drive motion. The system is controlled similar to balancing of an inverted pendulum. The other pair of the two-wheel is flipped during climbing a stair. In this paper Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) and Sliding Mode Controller (SMC) are applied to balance the system in its upright position. The performances of both controllers are compared from both simulations and experiments.