Design and production of a prototype wheeled pendulum for the new 2.004 laboratory

Abstract

The goal of this thesis was to create a piece of physical hardware that would be suited for a multi-week design project for the design component of the Dynamics and Control II (M.I.T. course number: 2.004) laboratory. The wheeled pendulum model was chosen as an appropriate system to use in the second half of the laboratory component of 2.004 because of its clearly defined and well understood system. The inverted (or wheeled) pendulum is a classic controls problem-in the absence of a controls component, the system is non-linear and unstable. This thesis analyzes the system dynamics by deriving the equations of motion for the wheeled pendulum, and uses mathematical modeling (MatlabTM) to further understand the instability of the system. Based on the Matlab models, several design iterations were developed, and a robust, functional prototype of the wheeled pendulum was created.