Balancing an inverted double pendulum

James Cann November 29, 2010 at 4:18pm

Yes, that is impressive, and it just serves to show that eventually, when the humans in the back seat consider it "The New Way It's Alway Been(tm)", autonomous aircraft will be the norm in the air.

Tom Yochum November 29, 2010 at 9:50am

Wow! I had a lot of fun with the inverted pendulum as an undergrad, but the idea of a double pendulum makes me cringe. Well done!

Geoffrey L. Barrows November 28, 2010 at 7:20am

Awesome! It reminds me of some work in the 90's by Stanford Prof Bernard Widrow's group. They had worked out a neural network that can back up a truck+trailer, and then they extended it so that an RC truck+trailor could be driven backwards. I saw an actual demo of that in one grad student's basement. Essentially the controller would enforce a turning radius based on the input steering signal. I think for his thesis he was going to next try a double trailer. He got it working a little in simulation but I don't know about in reality.