A novel MATLAB toolbox for Control101 courses

Abstract

In recent years the educationally focused parts of the global control community have given some focus to what constitutes a sensible first course in control (Rossiter et al., 2020) and how to support this with high quality learning and teaching resources. This paper contributes to that overall effort in that it provides an example of high quality, open-access resources to support students in their independent learning. One aspect of the ideal first course in control is the suggestion that we (the community) focus more on concepts and understanding and less on tedious paper and pen calculations; to do this the community needs suitable easy to use software for performing computations and producing illustrations. Hence the author is leading what he hopes will be a collaborative community project on creating a MATLAB toolbox to provide such software. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the toolbox, present its current contents and thus enable staff to evaluate and adopt this toolbox and moreover, to reflect on how it might be improved.