Swing-up control of the acrobot: An impulse-momentum approach

An impulse-momentum approach is proposed for swing-up control of the acrobot. The algorithm is based on increasing the total energy of the system using impulsive inputs. After increasing the energy of the system, rest-to-rest maneuvers are employed to regulate the system energy to the desired level that corresponds to the upright configuration of the acrobot. The proposed algorithm is implemented with two sets of acrobot parameters taken from the literature. As compared to the approaches in the literature, the simulation results show shorter swing-up time and lower maximum continuous torques. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm does not impose any restrictions on the initial conditions and controller gains for swing-up.