The balance control system of the RIP must meet a number of tasks:
- reading and computing the process variables (pendulum angle from the upright position a and the angular position of the pivot arm 0, the angular velocities of the inverted pendulum and pivot arm a dot and 0 dot);
- supply the command voltage for the dc motor;
- implementation of the control algorithms;
- communication with PC for the monitoring the whole process.
Due the number of tasks and to improve the computing speed, the balance control system was implemented on a hardware platform which contains a network with three major components: the measurement interface, the main interface for the RIP control and PC communication and the command interface of the dc motor. The block diagram of the hardware architecture is presented in Fig. 4.