Modelling, design and control of a Cart Inverted Pendulum with electrical and pneumatic actuation

This dissertation is related to the control of a Cart Inverted Pendulum system, starting from the modelling and design of a test benchmark using a DC Motor and a transmission mechanism composed by a screw and a linear guide. The electric motor is controlled by a driver and a PLC. The chosen simulation environment for this purpose is Matlab/Simulink used for the design of different type of controllers. The project starts from the definition of a mathematical model translated in a Simulink functional block’s system that reflects the transfer functions of the system. The controllers are designed with different techniques: the first related to two PID controllers with different architectures (cascade and two parallel loop) useful for their simplicity; on the other hand, the static state feedback technique is used like pole placement or LQR with an integral action and an observer to adapt these control techniques to the measures that are available in the project of the real test benchmark. Afterwards, the same control techniques are applied to a real benchmark just designed and built at the Laboratory of the Politecnico di Torino described in the thesis of [PONTIN] that uses a pneumatic actuation. Finally, in last chapter, a comparison of the various designed techniques are presented: all compensator have been computed in order to guarantee the specifications on the time response and the physical constraints of the plant (voltage in the electric actuation and internal chamber pressure on the pneumatic side). All the results are commented to guarantee a detailed report on the entire study carried out on this classical control theory problem.