Laboratories and real-time computing: integrating experiments into control courses

The paper describes the approach used at the Department of Automatic Control at Lund Institute of Technology to maintain a high level of practical laboratory experiments. The Department integrates laboratory experiments into its control courses. If the laboratory exercises are properly organized and the student volume is sufficiently large, it is possible to combine a high level of practical laboratory experiments in control education at a reasonable cost. The use of off-the-shelf hardware and open-source software are important, With desktop processes, it is possible to achieve high utilization of lab space and high student throughput.