Control of a unicycle robot using a non-model based controller

Abstract

This paper proposes a control system to keep the balance of a unicycle robot. The robot consists of the disk and wheel, for balancing and driving respectively, and the tile angle is measured and used for balancing by the IMU sensor. A PID controller is designed based on a non-model based algorithm to prove that it is possible to control the unicycle robot without any approximated linear system model such as the sliding mode control algorithm. The PID controller has the advantage that it is simple to design the controller and it does not require an unnecessary complex formula. In this paper, assuming that the pitch and roll axis are dynamically decoupled, each of the two controllers are designed separately. A reaction wheel pendulum method is used for the control of the roll axis, that is, for balancing and an inverted pendulum concept is used for the control of the pitch axis. To confirm the performance of the proposed controllers using MATLAB Simulink, the dynamic equations of the robot are derived. © ICROS 2014.