Sensors & Transducers, Vol. 156, Issue 9, September 2013, pp.

324-329

Sensors & Transducers

2013 by IFSA
http://www.sensorsportal.com

Digital Double-loop PID Controller

for Inverted Pendulum
Ming Li
College of Mathematics & Computer Science, Wuhan Textile University, Wuhan, 430070, China
Tel.: 0086-27-59367297
E-mail: lettermail.lm@gmail.com

Received: 5 June 2013 /Accepted: 25 August 2013 /Published: 30 September 2013

Abstract: Inverted pendulum system is a complicated, unstable and multivariable nonlinear system. In order to
control the angle and displacement of inverted pendulum system effectively, a novel double-loop digital PID
control strategy is presented in this paper. Based on impulse transfer function, the model of the single linear
inverted pendulum system is divided into two parts according to the controlled parameters. The inner control
loop that is formed by the digital PID feedback control can control the angle of the pendulum, while in order to
control the cart displacement, the digital PID series control is adopted to form the outer control loop. The
simulation results show the digital control strategy is very effective to single inverted pendulum and when the
sampling period is selected as 50 ms, the performance of the digital control system is similar to that of the
analog control system. Copyright 2013 IFSA.

Keywords: Inverted pendulum, Double-loop PID control, Digital control, Sampling period.

1. Introduction stage numbers, there have single, double and multi-

In the development of control theory, the
correctness and feasibility of the theory must be
validated by a typical object. The inverted pendulum
system, which can reflect some problems in control
systems such as nonlinearity, robustness, stabilization,
and following control, etc., is an ideal platform to
carry out these experiments. The rocket's flight
control can be simplified as an inverted pendulum
system, so as the step robot control and the satellite
attitude control. Therefore it has remarkably
theoretical and practical significances to research
how to control inverted pendulum systems.
Inverted pendulum is a kind of complicated,
unstable and multivariable nonlinear system. There
are many types of inverted pendulum systems.
According to the shapes of the inverted pendulum,
there have linear type and ring type etc.; according to
stage inverted pendulum systems; but according to
the types of control electric motor, there have single
motor, multi motors etc. [1-3]. From 1960 s, there are
increasingly interests to research inverted pendulum
systems. L. F. Sun et al. [3] introduced some control
methods for inverted pendulum and holded that
intelligent control method is better than linear control
method. Some researchers [4-8] have developed
some control strategies for the cart-pole inverted
pendulum system using fuzzy logic controller. Siuka
et al. [9] deals with the application of energy based
control methods for the inverted pendulum on a cart
model and presented a swing up controller. There
have been some studies [10-12] on PID methods for
the purpose of balance control of inverted pendulum
system. Also, some other people [13, 14] have
researched the adaptive control problems of inverted
pendulum systems. Aguilar-Ibanez et al. [15] present

324 Article number P_1364

 Sensors & Transducers, Vol. 156, Issue 9, September 2013, pp. 324-329

an output feedback stabilization method for the The transfer function of the linear inverted
Inverted Pendulum Cart system around its unstable pendulum is:
equilibrium point, and adapt an observer based
controller devoted to render the closed-loop system to X (s)
G(s)
the origin. Mladenov [16] had used two Neural F (s)
Network controllers to swing a pendulum attached to ml g (I ml 2 )s2
a cart from an initial downwards position to an
(MI Mml 2 mI )s4 b(I ml 2 )s3 (M m)m lg s2 bm lg s
upright position. But this works are based on state-
space representation, were focused on the analog PID (2)
controller which cant be implemented by the The control goal of the linear inverted pendulum
computer program easily. is to make the horizontal displacement of the cart
In this paper, under considering there exits the controllable while guaranteeing the pendulum
carts friction, in order to control the displacement of verticality. This problem is a type of classic control
the cart of the inverted pendulum system meanwhile systems with one input (external force F) and two
guaranteeing the pendulum verticality, the model of
outputs (angle of pendulum and car displacement
the single inverted pendulum system is divided into
x). In order to control two output parameters
two parts based on impulse transfer function. A novel
effectively, we must establish the mathematical
double-loop digital PID control strategy and how to
model of the linear inverted pendulum. According to
choose its sampling period are researched in this
formula (2), we can get two transfer functions for two
paper. Finally Use matlab/simulink to verify the
controllable parameters.
performance of the presented control strategy.
( s)
G1 (s)
F ( s)
2. Model of Linear Inverted
mls
Pendulum System
(MI Mml 2 mI )s3 b(I ml 2 )s2 (M m)m lg s bm lg
The single inverted pendulum system consists of (3)
a cart and a pendulum, as Fig. 1 (a) shows.
X ( s) ml g ( I ml 2 ) s 2
G2 ( s ) (4)
( s) mls 2

3. PID Controller
The PID controller consists of three components
that are proportion, integral and differential. The
mathematical expressions are
(a) (b)

Fig. 1. Single inverted pendulum system. 1 de(t )

u (t ) K P e(t ) e(t )dt TD
T I dt ,
(5)
By ignoring the air fiction and some minor U ( s) 1 KI
D( s ) K P (1 TD s ) K P KDs
fictions, the force diagrams of the cart and the E ( s) TI s s
pendulum are shown as Fig. 1 (b), where M is the
cart mass, x is the cart position, F is the force where
impacted on the cart, b is the cart friction coefficient,
m is the pendulum mass, 2L is the pendulum length, KP
is the included angle between the pendulum and KI , K D K PTD (6)
TI
the vertical direction, and I is the pendulum
rotary inertia.
If T denotes the sampling period, we can conclude
The dynamic models of the single inverted
the positional PID controller as
pendulum system are nonlinear differential equations.
If selecting the working points 0 0, x0 0 and k

linearizing the system, we have the simplified u ( k ) K P' e( k ) K I' e( j ) K D' e(k ) e(k 1) , (7)
j 0
mathematical models of the inverted pendulum
system. They are:
where

( I ml ) mlx ml g
2
T T K
(1) K P' K P , K I' K P TK I , K D' K P D D (8)
x bx ml F
( M m) TI T T

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 Sensors & Transducers, Vol. 156, Issue 9, September 2013, pp. 324-329
According to Z transformation, we can get the
impulse transfer function of the digital PID controller
U ( z)
D( z )
E( z)
( K ' K I' K D' ) z 2 ( K P' 2 K D' ) z K D'
P
z2 z
The block diagram of single-loop analog PID
control system is shown in Fig. 2 that can only
control the displacement x of the car.
Xr(s) PID
G1(s)
controller
Fig. 2. Single-loop PID control system for single
inverted pendulum.
4. Double-loop Digital PID Controller
As to single-loop PID control system, three
components, the proportion, integral, differential, are
located in the forward channel of control system. But
as to double-loop PID control system, a PID
controller and the object can form an inner loop that
can make the unstable object stable; in the forward
channel of the control system, another PID controller
and the object form an outer loop that can make the
control system have the expected performance [17].
Because the single inverted pendulum has one input
Xr(s)
Digital PID1
Fig. 4. Structure of digital double-loop PID control system for inverted pendulum.
The sampling period T is a very important
parameter in digital control system. We must choose
the sampling period according to the performance
requirements and the development cost of the digital
control systems. When the sampling period is larger,
the demands for the operation speed of computers are
lower, so it is helpful to cut down the cost of digital
controllers, but too large sampling period will
degrade the performance of control systems. While
the sampling period is smaller, the performance of
326
and two outputs, we can divide the mathematical
model into two parts, as shown in equations (3) and
(4). When we use the double-loop PID controller, the
inner loop controls the pendulum angle and the outer
loop controls the cart horizontal position.
(9) Fig. 3 shows the block diagram of the analog
double-loop PID control system. In order to simplify
the computation, two PID controllers are all designed
as PD controllers. An amplifier G is placed in the
inner loop in order to suppress interference and unit
negative feedback is used in the outer loop in order to
obtain better following performance.
X(s) (s) X(s)
Xr(s)
PID1 Amplifier G G1(s) G2(s)
(s)
G2(2)
PID2
Fig. 3. Analog double-loop PID control system
for inverted pendulum.
Although the analog double-loop PID controllers
can make the performance of the inverted pendulum
system good, they cant be implemented by computer
easily and their development cost is very expensive.
Therefore we must design a digital controller that can
make the performance of the inverted pendulum
control system meet the control requirements. Based
on the analog double-loop PID control system, we
can get the control strategy of the digital double-loop
controller using sampling control theory that is
illustrated in Fig. 4.
(s) X(s)
Amplifier G ZOH G1(s) G2(s)
Digital PID2
digital control systems will be improved, but the
demands for the operation speed of computers are
higher, which lead to increase the development cost
of digital control systems. Furthermore, excessive
sampling period has little help to improve the control
performance. Therefore the sampling period T must
be chosen correctly. In this paper, we suppose the
inner loop and the outer loop in the digital double-
loop control system have the same sampling period.
 Sensors & Transducers, Vol. 156, Issue 9, September 2013, pp. 324-329

5. Simulation Analysis In order to obtain the control results of digital

In order to compare and analyze the control
results of these control strategies for linear inverted
pendulum, Matlab/Simulink [18] is used to simulate.
Suppose the parameters of the linear inverted
pendulum are: M=1 kg, m=1 kg, 2L=0.6 m,
b=0.1 N/m.s, I=0.03 kg.m2. From equations (2), (3)
and (4), we can get:
double-loop PID control system, set the sampling
period T as 100 ms, 90 ms, 80 ms, 50 ms, 10 ms and
5 ms respectively. According to equation (8), the
parameters of the digital PID controller will be
obtained directly from the analog PID controller. The
results are shown in Table 1.
Table 1. Parameters of the digital PID controller.

X (s) 0.12 s 2 3 Sampling Digital PID1 Digital PID2

G (s) period T
F ( s ) 0.15s 4 0.012 s 3 6 s 2 0.3s KP1 KD1 KP2 KD2
100 ms 0.12 1.2 1.625 1.75
( s) 0.3s 90 ms 0.12 1.33 1.625 1.94
G1 ( s )
F ( s ) 0.15s 0.012 s 2 6 s 0.3
3 80 ms 0.12 1.5 1.625 2.19
50 ms 0.12 2.4 1.625 3.5
X ( s ) 0.12s 2 3 10 ms 0.12 12 1.625 17.5
G2 ( s) 5 ms 0.12 24 1.625 35
(s) 0.3s 2

The analog single-loop PID control system, When T is set as 100 ms, the simulation result is
illustrated in Fig. 2, can be simulated by Simulink. shown in Fig. 6 (a). While T is set as 90 ms and
The simulation results show that no matter how to 80 ms, the results can be seen in Fig. 6 (b). The
modify the parameters KP, KI and KD of the Fig. 6 (c) is the simulation results when T is set as
controller, the control system is always unstable, 50 ms, 10 ms and 5 ms.
which proves the single-loop PID controller isnt fit From the simulation results, we can get the
for the control of this type of inverted performance indexes of the digital double-loop PID
pendulum system. control system as Table 2 shows.
When simulation of analog double-loop PID
control system for the linear inverted pendulum, we
set the parameters of the control system as Table 2. Performance indexes of the digital
double-loop control system.
K p1 0.12, K D1 0.12 , K p 2 1.625, K D 2 0.175 and
G= -32. Then the step response of the control system Cart position x Pendulum angle
Sampling
can be get in Fig. 5, from which we can conclude that period Over- Setting Over- Setting
for the pendulum angle, the overshoot is 12.33 % and shoot time shoot time
the setting time is 3.12 s ( 2 %); as to the cart 100 ms Unstable Unstable Unstable Unstable
position, the overshoot is 15.55 % and the setting 90 ms 85.5 % 33.03 s 104.7 % 40.23 s
time is 6.15 s ( 2 %). The results show the analog 103.02
80 ms 50.6 % 5.92 s 4.64 s
double-loop PID controller is effective to control the %
linear inverted pendulum system. 50 ms 38.2 % 6.05 s 82.3 % 2.4 s
10 ms 38.5 % 6.13 s 60.7 % 2.46 s
5 ms 38.5 % 6.14 s 59 % 2.46 s

From Table 2, we can conclude that when

Fig. 5. Step response of analog double-loop
PID control system.
T=100 ms the digital control system is unstable;
When T=90 ms the control system become stable, but
the performances are very bad which means the
control system has little practical value; when
T=80 ms, the system performances is improved
greatly. When T is between 5 ms and 50 ms, we can
see that the performances of the digital control
system have little change and are very similar to
those of the analog double-loop control system.
The simulation results further prove that when the
analog control system is transformed into the digital
control system, the system performances will
degrade. So we must select the sampling time T
correctly when we use digital control system. As to
the single inverted pendulum, the controlled

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 Sensors & Transducers, Vol. 156, Issue 9, September 2013, pp. 324-329
parameter changes very quickly, so it is better that
the sampling time T is set as 50 ms. Finally we can
conclude that the digital double-loop PID controller
is a good solution to control the single inverted
pendulum system.
(a)
(b)
(c)
Fig. 6. Step responses of digital PID controller.
328
6. Conclusions
The inverted pendulum system is a complicated,
unstable and multivariable nonlinear system that can
reflect many typical problems in control systems, so
researching inverted pendulum control system has
remarkably theoretical and practical significance.
Because the digital controller can be easily
implemented by the computer program, it is a cheap
controller and has very high practical value. The
research results in this paper show: the single-loop
PID controller is not suitable to control the single
inverted pendulum that is unstable and has one input
and multiple outputs. As to this type of problems, the
controlled objects can be divided into different parts
according to the numbers of the controlled
parameters and also different mathematical models
should be established. The digital double-loop PID
controller is a good solution for the single inverted
pendulum with one input and two outputs. For the
controlled parameter changes very quickly, it is a
good way that the sampling time T is set as 50 ms in
order that the digital control system has good
performance and cheaper cost.
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