A JAVA BASED SIMULATOR FOR BASIC CONTROL EDUCATION

In this paper we present a java based simulator for control education in basic courses. The application has been developed using the well known tool Easy Java Simulation.The objective of the application is to help the student to learn the design of classic controllers such as P, PI, PID, etc testing the tuning procedures to control the position of an antenna controlled by a DC motor. Thus the application allows the student to choose the parameters of the antenna and the DC motor, to choose the controller to be used and its parameters and finally to simulate the closed loop system observing the evolution of the signals as well as a 3-D view. Furthermore, in order to show the real behavior of the system, dead zone, saturation, disturbances and non-linearities can be added to the model. This application has been used by the authors to teach a basic control course at Escuela Superior de Ingenieros (University of Seville) as virtual laboratory.Moreover, since the application is java based, this can be used by the students from the authors’ web pages and this can also be installed in the student's laptop (whichever the platform is) by downloading it from the authors web page (Limon and Salas, 2003).