Design and study of a pneumatically actuated inverted pendulum system controlled using a programmable logic controller

This article investigates an inverted pendulum on a mobile cart (mobile inverted pendulum) controlled via a programma- ble logic controller and actuated by a double-acting pneumatic cylinder. The study is conducted both theoretically, by modeling and simulating the entire system, and experimentally, using a specially developed test bench. Four low-cost 2/2 proportional valves are used for cylinder control. The control architecture consists of two nested control loops with proportional–integral–derivative compensators. To reduce cost, a programmable logic controller was used to manage both the system control and data acquisition. The results of the simulations carried out using linear and nonlinear mod- els of the system were validated by comparison with those obtained experimentally.