UNIFYING CONTROL DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION IN AN UNDERGRADUATE CONTROL SYSTEMS LABORATORY

This paper discusses the development and evolution of an undergraduate teaching laboratory for control systems in the Aerospace Engineering Department at the University of Texas at Austin. Initially, the laboratory was developed using disparate software packages for design, analysis and real-time implementation. In the second semester of teaching the course, LabVIEW from National Instruments was utilized for all pre-laboratory homework as well as for the laboratory experiments. The student feedback for the course improved significantly between the first and second semesters of teaching the course. This improvement is shown to be strongly related to the introduction of a unified, hands-on approach using LabVIEW.