Control System
Instructional Laboratory
Electrical Engineering and Computer
Science Department
Milwaukee School of Engineering
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 up 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
Equipment and Software
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 Real-Time Workshop® 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.



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