2003 Volume 39 Issue 9 Pages 835-840
This paper studies the energy based control for swinging up two inverted pendulums on a cart. This paper presents an original and detail analysis of the convergence of the energies of two pendulums and provides the condition such that the pendulums can be swung up. Moreover, the motion of two pendulums under the energy based control is investigated and the stability analysis of the motion is carried out via the concept of stability of an invariant set. All these analyses not only show theoretically the effectiveness of the energy based control for swinging up two pendulums, but also pave an way for analyzing and designing the energy based control for more complicated underactuated mechanical systems.