On balancing control strategies for a reaction wheel pendulum

This paper investigates various balancing control techniques for a reaction wheel pendulum, a prototype of a nonlinear underactuated system. Using classical linearization techniques three different linear models of RWP system are derived around the upright unstable equilibrium point In the first model the exact nonlinear dynamics of RWP using EL formulations is linearized using Taylor's series first order approximation. Second linearization technique uses collocated linearization which converts the system dynamics to two disjoint subsystems having nonlinear and linear dynamics. In the third model the state transformation is used in such a way that system dynamics changes from fourth order to third order. All the algorithms have been simulated and experimented in real tune. Finally a fuzzy logic controller has been implemented for balancing the reaction wheel pendulum.