-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 0
1. Walking through knowledge
As a matter of fact, this project has an immense mathematical background, let me list the main fields you should explore.
The Inverted Pendulum is one of the most famous systems used to describe a non-linear system which has an unstable fixed point, whereas the pendulum rests in a stable fixed point.
This dynamical system, of course, has been very well studied and documented and obtain the equations that model the system is not a hard task. However having them doesn't mean understanding the system at first glance.
The mathematical model that describes the pendulum behaviour is based on differential equations, this is a beautiful branch of maths that has a lot to be developed since we only know how to play with them but there are lots of them that scares us and we are not able to solve yet.
Basic operations such as integrate or differentiate will be needed in the code to process the signal.
As you see, we would end up talking about the logic involved in the code or even in the algebra that can be used when taking other approaches to the problem such as advanced control. So, never forget the beauty of maths that is underlying in your projects.
One of the most interesting things that motivate this project is the [control theory] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_theory) that can be applied. Control it's world wide spread and is present in your daily routine. The basic idea it's to get to know the behaviour of a system to be able to control it, allowing us to make it stable or unstable and this is all maths. But the control theory brings us some important concepts about systems.
In this project, and this stage of it, we are limited to "basic", but not for that bad ones, techniques. However we aim to apply one of the most important controllers nowadays, the PID.
The signal processing it's one the main pillars of telecommunications and electronics and since that, it has been studied deeply. We will apply some filters to clarify and correct the signal that our sensor generates, this is very critical since we want reliable data to have the chance of applying control.
We are using MEMS, microcontrollers, motor drivers etc. and so a good background of electronics is needed but don't get worried if you don't have it because thanks to Arduino, today you can do anything starting in the zero position and having this in mind we haven't used any of this components in an environment not supported by the community.