Effects of nonlinear friction compensation in the inertia wheel pendulum

This paper discusses for the first time the effects of modeling, identifying and compensating nonlinear friction for the control of the inertia wheel pendulum and proposes a new algorithm for the stabilization of the pendulum at the upward unstable position. First, it is shown that the dynamic model with the proposed asymmetric Coulomb friction component characterizes better the real experimental platform of the system. Then, a feedback linearization based controller with friction compensation was designed, where theoretical results show the stability of the output trajectories. Finally, the new algorithm was experimentally compared with its version without friction compensation, showing that the new scheme yields better performance with less power consumption.