Development of a Teaching Laboratory for Undergraduate Control Systems Teaching

Developing a Student—Focused Undergraduate Laboratory

“…The specific rig chosen for Control Systems I was the position control of a printer head, inspired by [2] and [5]; this is discussed in 2. It was one of a suite of experiments developed as part of a fourth year team project in the academic year 2008-2009 [7,6]; this is discussed in Section 3.1. We were fortunate that two members of the team stayed on at Manchester to study for PhDs and were available to roll out the final laboratory.…”

“…This option was selected as it reduced the amount of work that would have been required to design many similar but subtly different systems and meant that more time could be spent developing and documenting one interface that has the capability to be used with all the equipment in the laboratory." [7] To this end a multipurpose interface was designed and its prototype built. It took the form of a daughterboard that sits on an ELVIS II board (Fig 2 Two of the students involved in the team project remained at Manchester to study for PhDs.…”

“…As it has turned out the boards have not been used for any other experiments. In this sense they are at once overengineered (most of their functionality has not been used: this is discussed further in Section 3.2.2) and to an extent inappropriate (they are unsuitable Figure 4: Functionality of the ELVIS II daughterboard: taken from [7].…”

Design and Implementation of Mechatronics Home Lab for Undergraduate Mechatronics Teaching

“…The field of mechatronics is a practical study as much as a theoretical study, where the combination of physical components and theory from several engineering fields are applied to build complex machines. A pivotal pillar to mechatronics education is an active learning process through practical laboratory exercises and problem based learning, [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7]. Traditionally, a number of these exercises involve experiments with expensive stationary equipment, scheduled time, fixed location, etc., as in [1].…”