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Abstract: In this paper we consider the stabilization of a two-link robotic mechanism called the acrobot. The regulation strategies that have been successfully devised for the acrobot are reviewed, and a new switching controller is proposed. The new scheme uses a high-gain nonlinear control to force a set of system trajectories into the region of attraction of a gain-scheduled control, at which point the control is switched. A feature of the new controller is that there exists an analytical expression for an estimate of the induced region of attraction. Lastly, we discuss how the proposed switching controller can be generalized to a broad class of nonlinear systems