State Feedback Via Judicious Pole Placement and Linear Quadratic Regulator – Application to Rotary Inverted Pendulum

In the control system regulatory concept, placing closed loop poles too far from the origin in the stability region produces fast regulation time but requires huge forcing energy as a trade-off. As such, stabilizing an unstable system with minimum energy is needed, though this presents a challenge to the designer. At the design phase, the designer may ponder the optimized energy while compromising the possibility of catastrophic stabilization phenomena due to minimal forcing thrust towards the poles. In this manuscript, a simple Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) is proposed as an alternative to full state feedback (FSF) with judicious pole placement. The efficacy of both approaches was observed by exploiting a Rotary Inverted Pendulum (RIP) as a testbed. Beforehand, the RIP system dynamics were developed in the time domain. RIP is an under-actuated mechanical system that is inherently nonlinear and unstable. The main control objectives of RIP are swing-up control, stabilization control, switching control, and trajectory control. The methodology involved the appearance of weighted matrices that were necessary for the minimum cost function. The Riccati and Lyapunov criteria are also exploited to facilitate design. The result shows the comparative transient performances of the two approaches, where the LQR outperforms the FSF in many aspects.