The electrical engineering curriculum is experiencing a major restructuring that requires additional control laboratory experiments. For undergraduate students emphasizing controls, the university must provide a well-rounded education in the theory and practice of control systems design in the areas of manufacturing automation and classical control systems design. In addition, a manufacturing automation course must be provided for electrical engineering students not specializing in control and for the new Manufacturing Engineering program. The new equipment provides equipment for a new classical control systems design laboratory. This project provides additional equipment for the factory automation laboratory, which can see an increased number of students under the new curriculum. The innovative aspects of this project are a desktop version of a manufacturing process used in undergraduate control education; introduction of IEC 1 131-3 standard PLC programming languages to undergraduates; and small-scale robust processes that expose students to the challenges of control design in the context of real industry applications. *
