CONTROL ENGINEERING LEARNING USING A SOFTWARE TOOL FOR A LAB MOTOR

Control engineering is a multidisciplinary, exciting and challenging subject, which has become an essential part of the engineering curriculum. The traditional approach based on theoretical concepts with a strong mathematical foundation has led control engineering students to not believe that the material learnt in the classroom is ever going to be applied directly to the industry, and finally working control engineers lay aside analysis, and rely on trial-and-error methods. To bridging this gap, this paper presents a control engineering learning based on a software tool that commands a lab motor, which is used as a simplified scaled version of a real-life system. The graphical user interface developed provides a friendly interactive environment to perform the following tasks: sensor and actuator calibrations; experimental identification of non-linearities and linear models; comparative responses of the real-plant and tuned-model; interactive design of control strategies; digital control algorithms synthesis from a wide range of controller structures; real-time control of the physical plant; and comparatives with control simulations. Commercial software, such as MATLAB and EXCEL, are integrated in the application as resource servers. The whole arrangement is suitable for undergraduate courses in control systems for engineering students.