This paper deals with certain options on controlling an inverted rotary pendulum also known as the Furuta pendulum. Controlling an inverted pendulum involves two stages. The first stage is the swing up of the pendulum and the second stage is its balancing in the up-right position. The paper describes two possibilities on swinging up the pendulum. First one is the classical approach based on comparing the current total (potential and kinetic) energy of the system with the energy in its stabilized up-right position. The second option uses an exponentiation operation over the pendulum position since the trend of power law function is very convenient for determining the amount of required energy to be delivered to the system. For the purposes of balancing the pendulum in the up-right position a predictive controller based on optimal control law with perturbation was proposed, which is an LQ controller with control signal corrections when constraints are exceeded. The results are illustrated by real-time experiments on a laboratory rotary inverted pendulum setup.