Customized Online Laboratory Experiments A General Tool and Its Application to the Furuta Inverted Pendulum

Online laboratories (labs) are revolutionary tools that produce both economic and educational benefits. On one hand, online labs can be shared among institutions, drastically reducing traditional lab costs. On the other hand, students can access experimental resources at any time from any place using their electronic devices. This article presents an open source online lab experiment for the Furuta pendulum, a very popular system in control engineering education that helps researchers study interesting problems related to nonlinear dynamics and control theory. Thanks to the experimentation environment described in this article, students can define new controllers and validate them, program nontrivial experiments, plot real-time data streams, and avoid repetitive work. The environment's main component is a language designed specifically for programming experiments. As the environment is online itself, it runs on any device via a web browser and avoids any software installation. The environment is illustrated by solving two problems in the Furuta pendulum online lab: 1) defining a state-feedback linear-control law that keeps the pendulum in a vertical and upward position while its base follows position setpoint changes and 2) designing a more complex controller that swings the pendulum upward when it falls.