A Laboratory for a First Course in Control Systems

The design of automatic control systems nowadays requires a great deal of theoretical knowledge. The consequence of this fact is that a large number of new concepts have to be introduced in a first course in control systems. However, these concepts are in general introduced somehow independently and this poses serious problems when the students are required to deal with the whole design of a control system. In this paper a control laboratory is proposed with the view to putting together all the concepts previously introduced in a theoretical course. Experiments are suggested such that all the stages of a control system design, namely modeling/identification, design/simulation and implementation are covered.