Inverted pendulum control apparatus using transputers

Inverted pendulum control apparatus is structured which is controlled by a personal computer with transputer, analog-to-digital converter (A/D) and digital-to-analog converter (D/A) boards. For the apparatus, it is required to shorten the program processing time for input of data by A/D and output of calculation results by D/A. In order to implement control algorithms we investigated three programming methods for interfacing between the transputer and A/D or D/A converters; 1) by expanding I/O server, 2) by port-accessing using I/O server and 3) without use of I/O server. Each programming method is evaluated from the view point of their applicability to the inverted pendulum control which requires millisecond-order response. It is concluded that for the inverted pendulum control experiment the first method is the most suitable one because of the advantages of short processing time and easy programming of control algorithm in spite of the complexity of interface programming. These advantages are also confirmed by the control experiment. (author)