The objective of this project is to improve undergraduate controls engineering education. Students frequently have difficulties in learning controls; it is often the first subject in which they must use the properties of complex variables and the fundamentals of linear algebra in a sophisticated manner. The proposed education aids will illustrate control system design and analysis and enable students to quickly use the knowledge presented to them. We will develop useful, widely available, and easily accessible tutorials for undergraduate-level controls courses using Matlab, a popular computation and visualization software package, and the World Wide Web (WWW). These education aids would be a valuable addition to the undergraduate engineering curriculum at any university. Prototypes of these tutorials can be viewed on the WWW at www.engin.umich.edu/~tilbury/matlab_tutorial.html. The main innovation of these education aids is their implementation on the WWW. The tutorials will combine explanatory text with sample Matlab commands and illustrative plots and graphics. The outline of the tutorials will closely follow the outline of the most popular textbooks for undergraduate controls courses, including modeling, Laplace transforms, time-domain and frequency-domain relationships, root-locus methods, frequency-domain methods, state-space methods, and digital control. Analysis techniques such as determining the stability and steady-state error of a control system will be incorporated throughout the tutorials. The tutorials will contain example problems which are worked out in detail, showing all of the necessary steps, and sample problems for the students to work on independently. For these sample problems, several levels of hints will be included. There are three advantages to the approach taken in this project for teaching students how to use Matlab for control system design. First, the tutorials will be immediately available to students across the country at no cost to them. Any student with access to both the WWW through Mosaicing or Netscape "3" and to Matlab on either a personal computer or a workstation will be able to follow a tutorial while running Matlab and will be able to easily switch between the two programs. Second, students will be able to grasp key concepts and design techniques in a "learn by seeing and doing" manner. Commands shown in the tutorials can be copied from the Netscape or Mosaic window and pasted into the Matlab command window with a simple point and click of the mouse; there is no need for time-consuming typing and editing. Students can immediately see the result of an actual computation, compare it to the result shown on the tutorial, and quickly experiment with modifications of the code and changes of parameters. Third, by using the hypertext markup language on the WWW, the proposed on-line education aids can be highly interconnected. There will be several paths through a tutorial which have different levels of complexity or which emphasize different methods. By making the education aids available on the WWW, not only will they be easily integrated into an existing undergraduate controls curriculum in a traditional four-year university, but they could also be used by community colleges, industry, and individuals for continuing education. With the education aids which we will develop, it will be easy for engineers in academia and industry with access to the WWW and who currently know some classical control theory to learn how to use Matlab to apply their knowledge and to improve their skills and understanding.
