Two-Wheeled Self-Balancing Robot : Design and control based on the concept of an inverted pendulum

Abstract: In the last decade, the open source community has expanded to make it possible for people to build complex products at home. [13] In this thesis a two-wheeled self-balancing robot has been designed. These types of robots can be based on the physical problem of an inverted pendulum [12]. The system in itself requires active control in order to be stable. Using open source microcontroller Arduino Uno and reliable angular and positional data the system can be made stable by implementing a controller. A modern and efficient controller is the LQR - Linear Quadratic Regulator [12]. Being a state space feedback controller the model has to be a good representation of reality since the output signal depends on the model. In this thesis, the validation process was performed using a PID-regulator. The results showed that the model is not yet reliable. The reasons for this are discussed and recommendations for future development are listed.