Control of Slosh Instability: Experimental Verification with Underactuated Double Inverted Pendulum System

Slosh instability can result into disastrous effect on a system like spacecraft failure. In this paper, the control of a double inverted pendulum (DIP) on a cart is proposed to mimic the slosh control. A quantum particle swarm optimization (QPSO) based linear-quadratic-regulator (LQR) is proposed to stabilize the DIP on a moving cart. The performances of the LQR controller are optimized through the QPSO algorithm by selecting optimal values of the weighting matrix while maintaining system stability and accounting for unmodeled dynamics. The objective is to keep the pendulum stable at the inverted position while the moving cart tracks shifted positions. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through simulation and experimental results. Experimental verification of the proposed QPSO based LQR controller is also done considering external disturbances. The improvements in performances of the system are demonstrated with comparative results from a particle swarm optimization (PSO) based LQR controller.