Dynamic Systems Modeling and Control courses are often very mathematical and heavy on theory. Students often find the material too abstract, too mathematical, and difficult to master when it is presented in lectures. When a student builds some intuition for a specific topic, they are more likely to retain the information when compared with learning the material as a rote procedure. Activity-based learning can help in building this intuition.  Instructors always would like to incorporate experiments in these courses to make this abstract material concrete and increase students’ interest and understanding, that is, the use of laboratory-based activities in these course is not a new phenomenon but the advent of new software tools have changed the way these courses can be taught. Today’s engineering students should be provided with these tools to help them learn and understand the material more effectively. This paper presents some Simulink and micro controller based experiments developed to improve student’s understanding of the material presented in lectures and expose them to some practical considerations related to dynamic systems modeling and control.

At XXX University, Mechatronic system dynamics and control is a required junior level course taken by mechanical engineering students. This course combines modeling, simulation and control of dynamic system. This course includes a theoretical part where principles of system dynamics and system control are emphasized as well as a laboratory part to emphasize theoretical knowledge with hands-on experience using real time control systems. The experiments that were used in this course in the past involved microcontroller (Arduino) and C programming. The students needed to write their own code in C to program the microcontroller. Most of the student struggled in programming and they spend most of the lab time in debugging their code and were not able to finish their lab in time. They were frustrated and since their focus was on making their code run, they had no interest in what the laboratory activity was actually about and the whole objective of the lab is lost. Recently MATLAB/Simulink is introduced to the students in this course. This is the first time students use MATLAB in this course. When MATLAB/Simulink was introduced in this course, the students expressed that it is a fun and an interesting tool for simulating dynamic systems. They also asked if the labs can be based on Simulink and not on programming. The author did some research if Arduino can be communicated with Simulink and found that it can be used with MATLAB and Simulink without the purchase of any extra toolbox. Earlier the students used to do experiments that involve often costly equipment like power supply, oscilloscope and function generator. Simulink replace the need of using these costly equipment and it replaces function generator and oscilloscope in addition to serving as a simulation and algorithm development environment. Furthermore, the necessity of power supply can also be eliminated by using the Arduino board which can supply power for small experiments.


Development of Simulink Based Experiments for an Undergraduate Dynamic Systems & Control Course

Division / Sponsors: 
Aerospace, Bioengineering, Applied Mechanics, Design Engineering Division, Advanced Energy Systems, Manufacturing Engineering Division, Noise Control and Acoustics, Nondestructive Evaluation, Diagnosis, and Prognosis (NDPD), Nuclear Engineering Division, Process Industries Division, Fluids Engineering, Heat Transfer, Materials, Microelectromechanical Systems, Safety Engineering and Risk Analysis, Computers & Information in Engineering


Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IMECE/IMECE2020/volume/84478

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