Swing Up and Stabilization Control of the Pendubot

This paper presents swing up and stabilization control of an underactuated two-link robot called the Pendubot. This device is a two-link planar robot with an actuator at the shoulder, but no actuator at the elbow. The controller swings up first link from its open loop stable equilibrium point to the unstable equilibrium point and then, catches the unactuated second link to balance it there. Two control algorithms are used for this task. Proportional Derivative Control technique is used to design the swing up control. The linear model of Pendubot is obtained by linearizing the nonlinear dynamic equations about the desired equilibrium point and LQR technique is used to design a stabilization controller.