Control System
Instructional Laboratory
Electrical Engineering and Computer
Science Department
Milwaukee School of Engineering
Dr. Hadi Saadat
The Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at Milwaukee School of Engineering is equipped with a modern control system laboratory. This laboratory is established to enhance the quality of undergraduate education in control systems and to reinforce the concepts that are covered in the lectures. This real-time control laboratory would also open research activities for graduate student projects. The laboratory is fully equipped with state-of-the-art computer aided control for analog and digital control systems simulations, analysis and design.
The undergraduate experiments give students the opportunity to tie theoretical classroom concepts with practical hands-on experiments. The objective is to provide undergraduate students with computer-based control and introduce them to concepts such as client-server environment, visual instrumentation, automatic code generation, and the modern techniques needed for the design and implementation of automatic control systems. The students perform all their design work on their laptops. They connect their laptops to the host computer via an Ethernet cable; generate the real-time code on their laptops, which is downloaded automatically to the host computer. The control is executed on the host computer and data is streamed to the laptop for on-line parameter tuning. The undergraduate courses using this laboratory are
The analysis and design of control systems in this laboratory is carried out via MATLAB® and Control System Toolbox, which provide students with immediate access to an extensive range of analysis and design tools. The powerful graphical simulation tool Simulink® is used for modeling, design and simulation together with Simulink Coder to generate C codes from Simulink models for control of servo systems in real time. Finally, the Quanser WinCon provides data transfer between Simulink and the servo system and enable on-the-fly controller tuning and plotting real-time data.
The lab is equipped with ten Allen-Bradley industrial micro PC. Each PC contain the Quanser ISA MultiQ-2E Data Acquisition and Control Board, enabling real-time processing and storage of multi-channel analog input and output data. Also, at ach station there are Agilent 54600 oscilloscope, HP 33120A Function Generators, HP E3631A Power Supplies, HP 34401A multimeters, and General-Purpose Interface Bus (GPIB).
Each station is equipped with a Quanser UPM1503-240V Power Module and SRV02-ET Servo plant. The following modular mechatronic components provide the capability for design and control of systems with a wide variety of plant dynamics.
