The traditional approach to control education in Universities has been to enhance student learning with hardware style experiments. The associated experiments are always constrained by the fact that hardware must be provided. Thus typical experiments use tanks of water, servo motors, inverted pendula etc. These experiments are good in so far as they go. However, quoting a former student, "It is a bit like learning to fly a Jumbo Jet. One has the choice to learn on real hardware (say an ultralight aircraft) or on a simulator of the real aircraft under real flight scenarios". This paper explores this issue for control education and presents feedback from students comparing traditional hardware experiments with simulated experiments based around real world control system designs.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.