Educational low cost platform for control engineering

Abstract

[Abstract] Control engineering is a highly experimental field, therefore, the more practice activities, the better understanding of the basic concepts. On the other hand, the class resources are never as plentiful as desired, and the experiments require expensive equipments and maintenance. This work proposes a low cost experimental platform designed to be used in control engineering subjects. Although the tight budget has some drawbacks related to device quality, particular solutions are proposed, leading to a working platform with very good performance, that has been used in different applications such as lab practice classes and advanced control strategies projects. The platform performance shows that the use in both practice labs or controller design is possible showing very good results.