Hello Maker Community,
As many of you from control system background already know that balancing of Inverted Pendulum has been a classic problem used in teaching control system theory in engineering for years. It is also one of the most popular hardware experiment used both in labs and projects by students to gain hands-on experience of designing and tuning different control laws and tune them in real-time. For researchers of control system theory, Balancing of Rotary Inverted Pendulum has been a popular experiment to try new control laws and compare results against other control laws. It is also convenient to publish results in research journals as results can be compared and validated easily. To see the popularity of Rotary Inverted Pendulum, just checkout number of videos on YouTube on this topic.
It is not a rocket science to build an experiment setup for Rotary Inverted Pendulum that gives somewhat acceptable results. To design and built an experiment setup that produces consistent results which are close to theoretical ones requires high quality parts and many design iterations. Now, there are Rotary Inverted Pendulum experiment setups that faculties, researchers and students can purchase, instead of building one. But they are very expensive and sometimes they are not available for students to purchase.
At EnergizedLab, we have designed and built Rotary Inverted Pendulum called Prayog-I that is low-cost, yet produces consistent response and uses Arduino MKR Wifi 1010 as it's main controller. Students and researchers can collect data from experiments using Wifi, BlueTooth or Serial and perform experiments interactively without spending weeks in building one that may or may not work.
Using Arduino IDE with Prayog-I, students can program PID controllers in minutes, and tune controller gains iteratively as they observe and learn effect of each iteration on the experiment. They can monitor results on Serial Plotter or stream data in MATLAB/Simulink for better data visualization and analysis.
We hope to give every engineer an opportunity to experience control system and feel excited about the topic.
Best Regards,
EnergizedLab