Controlling the inverted pendulum by means of a nested saturation function

A nonlinear controller is presented for the stabilization of the underactuated inverted pendulum mounted on a cart. The fact that this system can be expressed as a chain of integrators, with an additionally nonlinear perturbation, allows us to use a nested saturation control technique to bring the pendulum to the top position, with zero displacement of the cart. The obtained closed-loop system is semiglobal, asymptotically stable, and locally exponentially stable, under the assumption that the position of the angle is initialized above the upper half plane.