The inverted pendulum problem as a senior design project

The 4-year baccalaureate degree in Electro-Mechanical Engineering Technology at Penn State New Kensington requires a project design course in the senior year. It is a capstone course that allows the students to apply the engineering principles encompassed in the courses that lead up to and include the senior year. A recent project was the so-called inverted pendulum problem. It consists of wheeled base with a vertical pendulum hinged on top of the base. The control system must move the wheeled base as required to keep the pendulum in a vertical position within a certain tolerance. While a working device can be purchased, a lot can be learned by building the device from scratch. In addition, there are also many papers published regarding the modeling and theoretical control of the system, but there is very little regarding the actual implementation of the mechanical device or its control system. These students encountered several problems in the selection of the overall mechanical design, the appropriate position measuring device, the final control elements, and the control algorithms. The focus of this paper is to describe the design, construction, testing, and lessons learned from this project.