1. Introduction
An inverted pendulum system is known as an underactuated mechanism, the main objective of which is to maintain in a vertical position a rod that rolls freely. Particularly, the inverted pendulum on a cart is composed by a rail on which the cart is mounted and has horizontal linear movement whereas the rod is attached to it. This is one of the most known inverted pendulum configurations and it is the plant under study of this work. Such a system is highly nonlinear, underactuated and it has an unstable equilibrium point, which makes it a pretty challenging exercise; for those reasons, it has become an important, well established and extensively studied problem in control theory.
Regarding inverted pendulums, several examples of applications can be found in sectors such as aerospace, biomechanics and transport. For example, in aerospace, active control of a rocket is required to keep it in an upside-down vertical position during takeoff. Here, the angle of inclination of the rocket is controlled by varying the angle of application of the thrust force, placed at the base of said rocket.
In biomechanics the inverted pendulum is frequently used to model walking bipeds, such as the humanoid robots. In biped robots, the support leg in contact with the ground is often modeled as an inverted pendulum, while the moving leg behaves like a pendulum that oscillates freely, suspended from the hip of the humanoid. Finally, it can be seen that a Segway human transporter is an inverted pendulum, the control of which is based on sensory inputs of gyroscopes mounted at the base of the Segway and a computer control system that maintains the balance while people walk on the vehicle.
As well as the examples shown above, there are many others associated with the applications of inverted pendulums, among which are the stabilization of cranes, the stabilization of the balancing of ships and cars, the positioning of a satellite, etc. Therefore, a study of inverted pendulum systems is an excellent starting point for understanding problems in dynamics and nonlinear control.
Fuzzy adaptive techniques have been successfully applied to several control problems like in [
1], where a fuzzy adaptive scheme is proposed to achieve the motion control objective of robot manipulators and it is implemented in a two degree of freedom robotic arm. Fundamentally, fuzzy adaptive control is a nonlinear scheme that uses fuzzy systems with adjustable parameters as function approximators, which compute the control law without necessarily having to incorporate the dynamic model of the plant [
2]. This kind of controllers may be robust enough and can deal with high nonlinear effects or with dynamics of the plant that changes during a task execution. That means, fuzzy adaptive controllers can compensate diverse phenomena, such as uncertainties, unmodeled dynamics or unknown variation in the parameters of the plant. That is one of the motivations to tackle the control of the inverted pendulum system through a fuzzy adaptive algorithm.
There exists a wide frame of previous works for the control of the inverted pendulum problem, and several of them with fuzzy adaptive approaches. However, most of them address the problem as a second-order system based on feedback linearization, dealing only with the rod dynamics and leading to the presence of unstable zero dynamics (the cart dynamics). Consequently, this might conduct to undesired behavior of the cart or hindering the experimental implementation of the controllers (as stated in [
3]). In [
4] a fuzzy adaptive controller in combination with a sliding mode action is proposed for operation of an inverted pendulum. The fuzzy system compensates for the plant nonlinearities and forces the inverted pendulum to track a prescribed reference model. When matching with the model occurs, the pendulum is stabilized at an upright position and the cart should return to its zero position. In [
5], an adaptive fuzzy algorithm is designed for the tracking of the cart and stabilization of the pendulum; nevertheless, a PD action had to be incorporated to deal with the states of the cart (position and velocity). The controller was successfully applied in experimentation but the stability of the overall closed-loop system is not studied and it is an open problem.
More recent efforts have been made to take into account the states of the cart in this kind of scheme. In [
6] an adaptive PD-like fuzzy controller is used with a good performance but only simulation results are presented and the stability of the algorithm is not proven. In [
7], the authors present the study of dynamic response of the inverted pendulum in terms of classical control theory. Theoretical and experimental results using LQR design are presented. In [
8] motion equations of a linear inverted pendulum system, and classical and artificial intelligence adaptive control algorithms are designed and implemented for real-time control. Classic PID controller and PID fuzzy logic controller methods are used to control the system. However, the authors in [
7,
8] do not use evolutionary techniques, nor is a stability analysis is presented. In [
9], the authors present the design of a fuzzy-evidential controller in order to realize the stability control of the planar inverted pendulum system. The authors do not present a stability analysis.
In this paper we propose an adaptive fuzzy controller with a full-state feedback, i.e., a feedback of the four states of the inverted pendulum system (positions and velocities of both, pendulum and cart). This algorithm is meant to solve the trajectory tracking of the cart and the stabilization of the pendulum at the unstable equilibrium (vertical position). The full-state feedback action is inspired in the work presented by [
3], where the nominal dynamic model of the plant is used in the control equation and only the disturbances are monitored through an adaptive fuzzy system. However, the stability of the system in closed-loop with the total control law is not studied. Those are the main differences regarding this work since the algorithm proposed here does not use any knowledge of the dynamic model; the adaptive fuzzy systems estimate the plant dynamics. The stability of the total control law and the adaptive fuzzy action together with the full-state feedback is proven through a classic adaptive system analysis [
10] based on the Lyapunov theory. The latter guarantees that the solutions (positions and velocities of pendulum and cart) are bounded.
Another part of this paper deals with the application of evolutionary algorithms (EA), which are a subset of evolutionary computing and they can be considered as generic optimization metaheuristic algorithms. Most EA are based upon swarm intelligence or bio-inspired computation and they have been gaining wide interest and attention in the community of optimization since they have some advantages in comparison to classic (deterministic) algorithms. Some of those advantages are that EA can address a problem even in the presence of discontinuities in the objective function and they can find optimal or near optimal solutions in big multi-dimensional search spaces with no dependence of the initial guess [
11].
Applications of EA have been done mainly in engineering problems. Particularly in control engineering, there exists a vast literature mainly used for tuning parameters in control equations. In [
12] the authors propose the use of the differential evolution (DE) algorithm with fuzzy logic for parameter adaptation in the optimal design of fuzzy controllers for nonlinear plants. The DE algorithm is enhanced using Type-1 and Interval Type-2 fuzzy systems for achieving dynamic adaptation of the mutation parameter. Four control optimization problems in which the DE algorithm optimizes the membership functions of the fuzzy controllers are presented. In [
13] a variant of the firefly algorithm (FFA) is presented as a tuning method to obtain, in simulation, the gains of a PID controller, which is implemented for a linear model of an automatic voltage regulator. In fuzzy control, there have been also works on the applications of EA to adjust the fuzzy systems used; for instance, in [
14] the optimization of a sectorial Mamdani-type fuzzy controller for a two degrees of freedom robot is reported. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is employed to adjust the centers and standard deviations of the input and output membership functions; scopes of research are limited to simulation. In [
15] a method for “optimal design” of an interval type-2 fuzzy control is presented. The control law is applied to a linear plant in simulation. The centers and standard deviations of the upper type-2 membership functions are adjusted in a restricted footprint of uncertainty, limiting in that way the search space of the optimization problem. The human evolutionary algorithm is used and three different objective functions are proposed. In [
16], a combination of approximate feedback linearization and sliding mode control approaches is applied to stabilize a fourth-order under-actuated nonlinear inverted pendulum system. A new version of PSO is implemented. The obtained results are illustrated in simulation and do not show a stability analysis. In [
17], an approach for automating and facilitating the inverted cart-pendulum (ICP) control in one step is proposed. A holistic optimization is performed by a simplified Ant Colony Optimization method with a constrained Nelder–Mead algorithm (ACO-NM). Simulation results on an ICP nonlinear model show that ACO-NM in the holistic approach is effective compared to other algorithms. Stability analysis is not proven and no real-time experiments are presented.
In sum, our contributions can be described as follows:
The proposed algorithm does not use any knowledge of the plant. Unlike previous works, a formal stability analysis of the closed-loop system is proven via Lyapunov theory and therefore, boundedness of the solutions (position and velocity of the pendulum on a cart) is guaranteed.
A comparison among several evolutionary techniques are carried out in simulation, and then successfully exported to real-time experiments without any change in the optimized membership functions; only the gains of the controller were tuned again.
This paper is organized as follows: In
Section 2, the modeling of the inverted pendulum on a cart system is described, as well as a brief explanation of the fuzzy systems considered. A review of the evolutionary algorithms PSO, DE and FFA used in order to optimize the performance of the adaptive fuzzy controller is also presented. In addition, the proposed controller design is derived and the stability analysis is developed. In
Section 3, control and optimization results are presented. Finally,
Section 4 concludes about some contributions of the proposed control strategy.
4. Conclusions
For the tracking control problem of the inverted pendulum on a cart, we proposed an adaptive fuzzy controller with a full-state feedback, which does not require any knowledge of the plant and uses the four states of the system: positions and velocities of both the pendulum and the cart. Stability and boundedness of solutions for the overall closed-loop system for this original controller were proven through a Lyapunov synthesis approach. The scheme was successfully implemented via simulation and real-time experiments, getting outstanding results and showing the feasibility of the controller, in addition of verifying the theoretical statements achieved here. Those are some of the contributions from this paper regarding previous works in which the problem is addressed as a second-order system based on feedback linearization dealing only with the rod dynamics and leading to the presence of unstable zero dynamics (the cart dynamics). This, consequently, might conduct to undesired behavior of the cart and infeasibility for experimental implementation. The previous works in which the four states of the system are taken into account do not present a study of the boundedness or stability of the signals of the closed-loop system.
As an added value, an optimization tuning was investigated via evolutionary algorithms; specifically PSO, FFA and DE were used. Everyone tuned the parameters of the fuzzy systems in a model-based simulation, and then those optimized parameters were used in real-time experiments. The performance of the controller was notoriously improved with respect to a previous heuristic tuning. The exportation of the optimization results in simulation to physical experiments represents another key contribution since in control applications usually most of the works do not show a validation of the optimization procedures for the real physical system.
Finally, despite the vastly documented fact that in general all EA are efficient and that each one can be more or less suitable for a given problem, in this work in particular, it is worth concluding that PSO had the best application based on its efficiency, ease implementation and fast convergence, without discrediting the results reached by DE and FFA as well as their capabilities.