Control and Stabilization of Soft Inverted Pendulum on a Cart

Abstract

Underactuated systems are systems that cannot be controlled to track any arbitrary trajectories in their configuration space. In this work, we introduce a novel soft-robotic pendulum on a cart system. This is an underactuated soft-robotic system with two degrees of under-actuation. We model the system, derive the kinematics, and motivated by the control strategies for classical underactuated systems, we study the swing-up control and stabilization of this system around the vertical equilibrium point. The switching-based control law uses an energy-based control for swing-up and LQR for stabilization once the system is within the region of attraction of LQR. The simulation results depict the efficaciousness of the developed control scheme. Further, in this thesis, we discuss the viability and feasibility of feedback linearization, partially feedback-linearize the system, and analyze the zero dynamics of the system.