Swing-up and stabilization of an inverted pendulum

Undergraduate thesis

An experimental setup was built for swinging up and stabilizing the well-known inverted pendulum. Part of the work consisted of writing the DAC and ADC card drivers and interfacing them with Matlab's Real-Time Workshop. 

A heuristic algorithm that forced the pendulum to oscillate at its resonance frequency was used to swing up the pendulum. Once the pendulum reached a neighborhood of the upright position, the controller switched to a stabilization algorithm consisting of an observer and a friction estimator cascaded with a linear quadratic regulator. Rolando Carrera supervised the thesis (in Spanish).