Monday, February 27, 2012

Inverted pendulum & experience in Acumen

Following standard procedure of classic mechanics, Mingkun set up the Lagrange equations, converted them to ODEs and give some arbitrary driving force to see how the system reacts.  Mingkun resorted to Mathematica to find the optimal force to balance the system under the constraint that minimal strength, minimal tilting, minimal horizontal shifting are considered.  In order to simulate one system with Acumen, Mingkun has to set up the equation of system, which is mostly differential equations. After that, converting them to ODE manually, or symbolic simplification is not very mentally challenging. In the end, Acumen is used to calculate a series of values for each system variable.  The most challenging part, Mingkun thinks, is the first phase, setting up system equations, and in this part, Mingkun could't get much help from Acumen'10 directly.