Control Systems Engineering Workshop
This 16-hour, hands-on course is designed to provide a practical and intuitive understanding of control theory. In addition to lectures on each topic, the participants get an Arduino-based temperature sensor and heater with plenty of time devoted to experimenting and learning on the hardware. By giving the participants an opportunity to experiment with the theory, they walk away with more confidence in what they learned and a better understanding of its application.
This course is best suited for:
Early-career engineers who want to bridge the gap between academic theory and professional implementation
Experienced control systems engineers who want to restore some lost hardware and simulation skills
Anyone who regularly works with a control systems team and is looking to improve that interface by having a better understanding of control systems and its nomenclature
Sitting through 16 hours of contol theory in two days sounds brutal. It is brutal if the attendees are faced with 16 hours of equations and detailed theory that no one would remember after the course was over.
This course is different.
Each section of the course is divided into three parts: A no-math introduction to a topic that focuses on building an intuitive understanding of the problem, a 5-10 minute video I created that describes the topic in the context of the larger control problem, and a lab where each student uses MATLAB/Simulink to interface with their hardware to explore that topic on their own.
By the end of the course, the students will have developed a closed loop control system that can track setpoint changes and reject disturbances, but more importantly, they will understand how to approach developing a control system for real hardware.
Brian and some of the course students working through one of the hardware control problems.
A list of the topics that are covered in this course
All of control engineering in a single map
The role of a control systems engineer
Understanding hardware and software
Running hardware open loop
The impact of disturbances on the system
Closed loop control without a model
Developing a model from first principles
System identification
Linear systems and linearization
Model-based controller tuning methods
Feedforward control
Stochastic processes and Kalman Filtering
“The students really appreciated a chance to have a 2-day “Control Theory Refresh” rather than the “drinking from the fire-hose” they received in many of their other training sessions. The agenda was a very good “soup to nuts” approach to reinforcing fundamentals that the students will most assuredly be expected to master in the coming years. The course has the right flow and the right elements, and being able to interface the agenda topics with Matlab / Simulink is pretty amazing. ”