Laboratory Equipment for Modeling, Analysis, Design, and Implementation of Control Systems in Engineering

Laboratory equipment for practicing activities enable technical skills development in engineering education. In control systems, affordable, portable, and easy to use equipment which allows practicing for the entire set of activities is required. This paper presents the development and validation of physical portable practicing equipment for control systems education in engineering. These resources aim to support the development of practicing activities comprising modeling, analysis, design, and implementation of commonly used and advanced controllers. The resources are a pendulum-based prototype and a thermic system-based prototype which allow to obtain a second order system and a first order system with time delay respectively. The prototypes are built using easy to use and easy to acquire elements. These resources were functionally validated according to defined requirements concerning modeling where temporal response of the prototypes were successfully used to find an input-output and state space representation, analysis where frequency response was identified and compared with analytical results, design and implementation of commonly used and advanced control algorithms including a Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID), and a state feedback where the prototypes were easily configured to deploy these algorithms. The prototypes were used in the development of projects activities of the control systems courses of the Electronics Engineering program at Universidad del Valle in the last and first academic periods of 2022 and 2023, respectively. Opinions from students were collected to address usability and pertinence of these resources evidencing suitability for engineering control systems education.