SMS pendulum systems

The SMS pendulum systems are a fully open-source family of rotary inverted pendulums developed in the Systems Modeling and Simulation group at Saarland University. They are built entirely from off-the-shelf components and are used both as a teaching platform for project-based courses in systems and control and as a testbed for research on nonlinear and data-driven control. Hardware, firmware, and software are released under the MIT license, so the whole platform, comprising mechanics, electronics, and control layers, is transparent and modular rather than a closed commercial black box.

The setup supports one or two pendulum links in firmware and is mechanically prepared for up to four, so the difficulty of the control problem can be scaled without replacing the hardware. Its use for project-based teaching is described in (Othmane & Flaßkamp, 2026).

Full details on the platform, including its architecture, the mechanical CAD files and assembly documentation, the electronic schematics and bill of materials, the firmware and supervisory control software, and experimental results, are collected on the dedicated SMS pendulum systems website.