Reachability Guarantees for Cart-Pole Swing-Up and Stabilization

The cart-pole swing-up is a canonical benchmark for nonlinear control of underactuated systems, yet an end-to-end guarantee linking the global swing-up maneuver to the local stabilizer is seldom formalized.

We present a reachability analysis of a switched energy-based/LQR controller that certifies convergence to the upright equilibrium from a compact set of initial conditions.

The swing-up law is derived from an energy-error Lyapunov function; canceling the autonomous conservative term yields a strictly sign-definite Lyapunov derivative, and convergence follows from LaSalle's invariance principle.

We also propose an augmented Lyapunov function to regulate the steady-state cart velocity to zero, for which we establish almost-global convergence.

For the controller handoff, a switching region is designed to lie strictly within the LQR region of attraction, formally certifying the swing-up-to-stabilization transition.

Numerical simulations corroborate the theoretical analysis.