Study on a two-loop control architecture to balance an inertia wheel pendulum

The paper presents a new control architecture consisting of two control loops to balance an Inertia Wheel Pendulum (IWP) of which the wheel is driven by a DC motor. The outer control loop uses a LQR controller to calculate the required torque to balance the IWP around the upright position based on the measurement of the pendulum angle and angular velocity. The inner control loop uses a PI controller to calculate the voltage applied to the DC motor such that the torque provided by the motor meets the requirement of the outer loop. Matlab simulation and real hardware experiments have been carried out to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.