Virtual and remote practices for learning control topics with a 3DOF quadrotor

This paper presents a new experimental setup to develop virtual and remote control practices for a 3DOF quadrotor, where the controllers are implemented as TwinCAT PLCs and the remote laboratory front-end, used to parameterize the PLC and show the system evolution, is implemented as an EJS applet. The characteristics of the plant, TwinCAT PLCs and EJS applet make this setup ideal for developing a wide range of control experiments for undergraduate and graduate students. On one hand, the quadrotor, a non-linear MIMO rotatory system, is an appealing testbed for different control-laws such as PIDs, state feedback, feedback linearization or sliding mode controllers. On the other hand, the possibility of parameterizing and observing the PLC behavior from a user-friendly remote applet facilitates the learning process of the students of introductory control subjects. Finally, the opportunity of running a TwinCAT PLC in any Windows PC with the free-trial TwinCAT software system installed permits more advanced students to learn how to program a PLC and analyze its behavior, over a simulated plant, in their own computers, before testing their program in the lab over the real quadrotor.