Self-tuning state-feedback control of a rotary pendulum system using adjustable degree-of-stability design

Abstract

This paper formulates an original hierarchical self-tuning control procedure to enhance the disturbance-rejection capability of under-actuated rotary pendulum systems against exogenous disturbances. The conventional state-feedback controllers generally make a trade-off between the robustness and control effort in a closed-loop system. To combine the aforementioned characteristics into a single framework, this paper contributes to develop and augment the baseline Linear-Quadratic-Regulator (LQR) with a novel “adjustable degree-of-stability design” module. This augmentation dynamically relocates the system's closed-loop poles in the stable (left-half) region of the complex plane by dynamically adjusting a single hyper-parameter that modifies the constituents of LQR's performance index. The hyper-parameter is adaptively modulated online via a pre-calibrated hyperbolic-secant-function that is driven by state-error variables. The performance of the proposed adaptive controller is benchmarked against fixed-gain controllers via credible hardware experiments conducted on the standard QNET Rotary Pendulum setup. The experimental outcomes indicate that the proposed controller significantly enhances the system's robustness against exogenous disturbances and maintains its stability within a broad range of operating conditions, without inducing peak servo requirements.