Final Words
This tutorial's objective was to show how to build a pneumatic inverted pendulum from mechanical, electronic to programming part. Once the concepts were conveyed the reader could do it themselves. This article try its best to present every details, however, reader might not have the same tools, same mechanical parts, or same circuit components, and the vendor link provided in TABLE 1 might be out of date. Therefore, reader might not be able to follow every step. But after reading this article, reader should gain enough knowledge to debug their own problems.
As shown in VIDEO 1 and VIDEO 2, the system’s performance is not very good. The main reasons are:
- Arduino cannot correctly track rotational encoder position without drifting. After about 10 seconds, the system loses calibration and will always fail.
- Piston dynamics are grossly approximated as linear. But in fact, it has highly nonlinear dynamics.
- Cart and angular velocity algorithms are currently accurate and susceptible to noise, limited by the computational power of the Arduino, causing oscillations and vibrations.