Development of a low-cost, portable hardware platform for teaching control and systems theory

This paper describes the development of a hardware platform designed to support the teaching of a variety of systems engineering concepts to students at all stages of the curriculum. The hardware is sufficiently low-cost, portable and robust to provide individuals with a ‘take-home lab', thus enabling the student to benefit from experiential based learning in a more flexible fashion than is otherwise provided by traditional laboratory classes. The hardware consists of a miniature three degree-of-freedom helicopter, connected to a PC via a National Instruments myDAQ data acquisition unit, and is housed within a small toolbox for transportation. Initial student feedback is presented, based upon the inaugural use of the hardware in a new MSc module that was run in the Spring Semester of 2013.