The paper addresses the problem of way-point tracking for the spherical inverted pendulum under the influence of a planar force. A nonlinear controller is proposed that drives the pendulum to track an ordered sequence of desired translational positions (xri,yri) by visiting their neighborhood Nmui in an inertial reference frame while stabilizing the pendulum about the upper equilibrium. The way-point tracking controller incorporates two parts: a nonlinear control law (we choose from our previous "global" or "semi-global" nonlinear controllers); a reference signal. The stability analysis is carried out. The effectiveness of the proposed strategy is evaluated in computer simulation.