Sliding Mode Control of Custom Built Rotary Inverted Pendulum

Inverted pendulums have been used for a long time as a typical laboratory setup for learning and testing of various control system techniques. In this paper, we present a new laboratory rotary inverted pendulum setup. The setup is equipped with a microcontroller containing a code for communicating directly with MATLAB/Simulink using Simulink Desktop Real Time. In this configuration students have the opportunity to implement a controller in MATLAB/Simulink or to implement it directly on the microcontroller. Its capabilities are tested using sliding mode control, first using simulation and then verified on the experimental setup.