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

Technical Committee on Control Education: A First Course in Systems and Control Engineering [Technical Activities]

“…Further evidence of pragmatism has also appeared in several recent publications [8], [9]. In parallel, a number of researchers have pursued the concept of takehome laboratories [10], [11], that is, real hardware that students can take home and thus access and experiment with using their own laptops. It is now accepted that such equipment can be built for as little as US$35 per unit, cheap enough to purchase and lend out to the entire cohort, thus incorporating interesting open-ended assignments and activities.…”

“…A very successful and widely adopted kit is the one in [10], which includes a large number of prepared files in Python and Matlab, so that students can focus on the application of their learning. The first author's department developed a take-home static helicopter kit [11] (see Figure 4), which fits in a small toolbox to support more advanced control modules. This does, however, cost approximately US$300 per unit.…”

A survey of international views on a first course in systems and control for engineering undergraduates

“…Similar statements can be made about laboratories. Whereas historically access to laboratories was very expensive and thus quite restricted in most universities, recently there has been a huge amount of work on for example remote access laboratories [13,22], take home laboratories [21,33,42], virtual laboratories [8,12,20,30] and thus significant opportunities to improve the student learning experience.…”

A survey of good practice in control education

“…No longer does each experiment need an expensive IO card or similar; instead one can plug into the computer directly via a USB port. This allows for the production and distribution of multiple copies of real equipment, which can even be taken home by students (Taylor, Jones and Eastwood 2013;Eichlere 2013).…”

“…Inspired by these examples, Sheffield staff (Taylor, Jones and Eastwood 2013) have recently developed their own take-home hardware to provide systems engineering students with a challenging and portable control problem. This hardware is shown in Figure 7 and consists of a miniature three-degree-of-freedom (3DOF) helicopter, interfaced to a PC via a NI myDAQ.…”