Virtual laboratory for sliding mode and PID control of rotary inverted pendulum

Abstract

This paper presents a new virtual laboratory tool which teaches sliding mode control (SMC) and proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control to graduate students. Additionally, it describes performance differences between two control methods graphically. This educational virtual laboratory tool contains the control of rotary inverted pendulum. This system is a typical example of nonlinear and under-actuated systems and also well-known in control engineering for practicing different control theories. At first, the nonlinear dynamic equations of the inverted pendulum are presented. Then a virtual laboratory tool is designed for SMC and PID. After that, the results are analyzed. The validity of designed tool is verified by an experiment.