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These are the course materials I developed as an introductory course in controls engineering for the Weapons and Systems Engineering Department at the United States Naval Academy during the fall of 2006.
ES360 is targeted at students who do not take differential equations. These students still need to receive instruction in controls engineering to meet their graduation requirements. This course is taught to 60 percent of graduates from the Naval Accademy. Approximately 300-400 students take this course each semester. ES360 has been designed to easily scale up to large numbers of students, assuming access to MATLAB/SIMULINK is available.
ES360 is a 1 credit hour course, taught in 13 two hour blocks (11 lessons and 2 exams). Because it is only a 1 credit course, students complete most of the course work during the class period. The only work required outside of class is:
The emphasis is on learning by discovery and experimentation (in hardware and software), rather than by lecturing.
Wherever possible, a qualitative understanding of the material is emphasized. However, since the topic is controls engineering, there is still a lot of quantitative problem solving.
For each lesson the instructor briefly introduces the lesson to the students. Students then spend the rest of the class period working together or individually to complete the lesson. The latter lessons (7 through 10) use MATLAB and SIMULINK to explore their concepts.
Every lesson (except Lesson 1) has a short pre-lab exercise. These exercises should take less than 20 minutes to complete. They are meant only as a reminder of material covered previously: particularly material which will be useful for the upcoming lesson. If the student is taking longer than 30 minutes to complete the pre-lab exercise, then they do not understand the material sufficiently.
| File | Size | Remarks |
|---|---|---|
| ES360_syllabus.pdf | 12 KB | The course syllabus and grading policy. |
| ES360_workbook.pdf | 2.4 MB | The workbook includes lessons 1 through 11. These are the lessons the students will spend most of their time in lab working on. It also has a short MATLAB and SIMULINK help section. Lessons 1-6 require minimal amounts of MATLAB. Lessons 7-10 are completely based in MATLAB and SIMULINK. Lesson 11 requires a custom built PID Controled Cart. |
| ES360_prelabs.pdf | 1 MB | These are of all the assignments (10 pre-labs and the final project) which are to be completed outside of class. |
| ES360_photo_supplement.pdf | 2.9 MB | The photo supplement is a collection of photographs and drawings of various system. This is to give the students practice identifying engery storage, dissapative, and conversion elements in real systems. The systems used on the exam will be taken from this collection. |
| ES360_practice_exam_1.pdf | 230 KB | Practice exam 1 and its solutions. Exam 1 covers lessons 1 through 5. |
| ES360_practice_exam_2.pdf | 245 KB | Practice exam 2 and its solutions. Exam 2 covers the whole course. |
| ES360_matlab.zip | 34 Kb | All the required MATLAB and SIMULINK files for lessons 1 through 10. |
| ES360_final_project.pdf | 17 KB | The final project for ES360 is a two page paper on a weapons realated control system. |
Solutions: If you would like solutions to the workbook or pre-lab exercises send me an email, rcortesi@mit.edu.
This is still a work in progress. I'm still in the process of posting the information about the PID controlled cart (hareware for Lesson 11) and the mass sping damper demos (Lesson 5b).
A big thanks to Adam Horn, for all his proof reading and feedback on the course materials.
Last updated on 11 DEC 2006