Stabilizing control of flexible inverted pendulum by means of H∞ control

This study shows that the stabilizing and positioning control of a flexible inverted pendulum of which the pivot is mounted on a cart is experimentally possible by means of H∞ control theory. Since the control system has an eigenvalue of zero, the design method of H∞ control utilizing a settling function is applied, and one controller is designed with consideration of the rigid and the flexible first modes and another is designed neglecting all flexible modes. By numerical calculations and experiments, we have investigated the positioning control characteristics and the robust stability against disturbance to the pendulum of each controller, and it has been made clear that the robust stability of the controller designed considering the flexible first mode is superior to the one designed neglecting all flexible modes.