A Unified Approach for Classroom and Laboratory Control Systems Education

Abstract

In this paper, a unified approach for control systems education will be presented. This approach is a friendly software and hardware platform that provides students with the necessary tools for gathering data for system identification, designing controllers, simulating the closed-loop system, and implementing the controller on real-time hardware. The proposed approach has been used in introductory control systems courses and can be easily extended to advanced and research-based courses. Software-based classroom assignments and projects have been presented based on this platform. Moreover, these classroom assignments and projects were smoothly extended to hardware-based labs. The feedback conveyed by students due to the incorporation of this platform into control engineering curricula has been positive. Also, professors have been endorsing the use of this platform as part of teaching control systems engineering.