Improvement of Practical Orientation in Teaching by Introduction of an Innovative Laboratory and Competition

In this paper, an innovative concept for a laboratory and a student competition for the improvement of practical orientation of control engineering teaching are presented. The overall goals of the new teaching concepts are to consolidate the student's control theory knowledge, to establish practical relevance of the lectures, to gain experience and to develop creativity as well as team-working skills. A laboratory is planned as an introduction to automatic control for students with no engineering background. The goal is to give the students a practical and basic overview of control theory. In addition, a student contest is introduced, which is focused on autonomous vehicle control problems such as path following and advanced cruise control.