Abstract
This paper studies the stabilizing control problem for an underactuated mechanical system (UMS) called inertia wheel pendulum (IWP). An inverse motion method is presented to solve this problem. First, the dynamic properties of the IWP system are analyzed. Based on the analysis results, a motion trajectory is constructed by using an inverse scheme in the time domain. Afterwards, a tracking control law is designed to make the IWP quickly track the constructed motion trajectory. This enables the stabilizing control objective of the IWP to be achieved along the trajectory. To validate the effectiveness of the presented method, a numerical example is presented finally.