Backstepping Controller Design for a 5 DOF Spherical Inverted Pendulum

Abstract

This paper presents a Backstepping controller for five degrees of freedom Spherical Inverted Pendulum. Since the system is nonlinear, unstable, underactuated and MIMO and has a nonsquare form, the classic control design cannot be applied to control it. In order to remedy this problem, we propose in this paper a new method based on hierarchical steps of the Backstepping controller taking into a count the nonlinearities that cannot be neglected. Furthermore, a Linear Quadratic Regulator controller and LQR + PID based on the linearized system model are also designed for performance comparison. Finally, a simulation study is carried out to prove the effectiveness of proposed control scheme and is validated using the virtual reality environment that proves the performance of the Backstepping controller over the linear ones where it brings the pendulum from any initial condition in the upper hemisphere while the base is brought to the origin of the coordinates.