This project develops a new interdisciplinary control systems laboratory in the Schools of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Oklahoma State University. This laboratory will consist of five test benches networked to five workstations supporting real- time computer aided software engineering (CASE) tools. Each test bench will have an experimental control system and an embedded processor. There are several features of the proposed lab which make it very interesting and unique. . It is interdisciplinary, bringing together a significant amount of experience in control and real-time systems from two different departments. . The equipment in the lab will be state of the art, including real-time kernels, computer-aided-design tools, and networking. An industrial advisory board will assist the principal investigators in insuring that the lab maintains high standards in this area. We want the laboratory experience to be consistent with the latest industrial practice. . There will be a wide variety of challenging and visually interesting systems to be controlled. Five such systems will be in the lab in any one semester, but new systems will be rotated through the lab from one semester to the next. . All of the systems to be controlled will be designed and built by student teams from the undergraduate capstone design course. There will be an on-going relationship between this lab and the capstone design course, as new systems will be created each semester for the foreseeable future. A test of this concept was conducted last semester, when a very successful system was created by a capstone design team. The main idea will be to get students excited about the design of control systems by giving them interesting and challenging problems to solve, with the latest technology equipment.
