Home▸Engineering & Materials▸Inverted Pendulum Balancer

🕹️ Inverted Pendulum: The Classic Control Problem

Interactive 3D cart-and-pole system where users tune feedback gains and apply disturbances, watching the controller push the cart to keep the pendulum balanced upright in real time.

Engineering & Materials3DModerate60 FPS

A pole balanced on top of a sliding cart is stabilized live by a tunable feedback controller — nudge the gains, push the pole, and watch the cart race back and forth to keep it upright.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

The full nonlinear cart-pole equations of motion drive the pole's tilt and the cart's slide, while a proportional-derivative controller reads angle and angular velocity to compute the corrective force applied to the cart.

🎮 How to Use

Adjust the angle gain, damping and centering sliders, toggle the controller off to watch gravity win, and use the push buttons to disturb the pole and see how quickly — or unstably — it recovers.

💡 Did You Know?

The cart-pole system is the standard benchmark for both classical control theory and reinforcement learning, including OpenAI Gym's widely used "CartPole" training environment.

⚙ Under the hood

Interactive 3D cart-and-pole rig where tuning PID or LQR controller gains shows how feedback force keeps an inherently unstable pendulum balanced upright.

inverted-pendulumcontrol-systemspid-controllqrfeedback-loopsstabilityengineering

3D · Three.js / WebGL renderer · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install