A low‐cost feedback control systems laboratory setup via Arduino–Simulink interface

Abstract

Control theory education, when supported by practice, becomes more comprehendible for students and useful for their professional career. This paper presents low‐cost experiments for laboratory sessions of a feedback control systems course, which introduces them modeling feedback control systems, proportional‐integral‐derivative (PID) controller design, root locus and Bode plots. The experiments are organized around the Arduino‐based identification and control of a DC motor via Matlab/Simulink. The objective of this laboratory session is to support teaching feedback control systems via experimental investigations on a low‐cost laboratory kit. The built in‐house setups support Arduino–Simulink interface, so that students can download their control diagrams in Simulink to the Arduino board directly. This interface allows students to utilize high level control design tools, such as Matlab/Simulink while working on a low‐cost hardware laboratory setup. Students’ performance in the written exams before and after the laboratory setup were reported to evaluate the instructional effectiveness. Besides, student feedback for four semesters are also presented to evaluate the effectiveness of the laboratory experiments.

An ultra‐low cost line follower robot as educational tool for teaching programming and circuit's foundations

“…An Arduino board has been used to develop a series of laboratory practices focused on the teaching‐learning process of control engineering, mainly focused on feedback control systems , a marked emphasis has been placed on control theory without going into detail about the hardware, for which it was proposed to use the communication interface between Simulink® and the Arduino board; the total cost is less than 100 USD. Another interesting application of this communication interface is focused on the understanding of data transmission by means of optical fiber .…”

A low‐cost, free‐software platform with hard real‐time performance for control engineering education

“…In Ref. , authors presented a series of low‐cost experiments for laboratory sessions of a feedback control systems course, organized around an Arduino‐based identification and control of a DC motor via Matlab/Simulink. In Ref.…”

“…Some of these works (e.g., ) have presented assessments on the students’ perception of the developed platforms, and have analyzed the educational advantages that they provide. In all of them, students have given positive reviews on the usefulness of the proposed platforms and activities.…”

“…In Ref. , user evaluation was carried out through a series of questions regarding the difficultness of the concepts and tools used during the laboratories. In Ref.…”

Control and Identification Toolbox (CIT): An Android application for teaching automatic control and system identification

“…Demirtas et al [10] created the VCL using LabVIEW in order to design sliding mode and PID controllers for a rotary inverted pendulum. In addition, references [6,11,21,29] present laboratory setups for the identification and/or control of a DC motor using MATLAB/ Simulink, where the experimental kits in [11,21] and [29] contain a dSPACE prototype, a FPGA, and an Arduino board, respectively. The authors Oliveira et al [24] propose a methodology for teaching the system identification of open-loop systems using the step response and the particle swarm optimization.…”