The inverted pendulum is a typical example of unstable systems and has been used for verification of designed control systems. It is also very popular in control education in laboratories, serving as a good example to show the utility of the state space approach to the controller design. This paper shows two kinds of experiment using inverted pendulum: one is the stabilization of a single spherical inverted pendulum by a plane manipulator using visual feedback, and the other is the state transfer control of a double pendulum. In the former experiment, the feedback stabilization using a CCD camera has major importance as an example of controller implementation with non-contact measurement. The latter involves the standard stabilizing regulation method and nonlinear control techniques. The details of the experimental systems, the control algorithms and the experimental results will be given.