An Undergraduate Laboratory Course in Real-Time Dynamic Control

This paper describes a real-time control laboratory course for undergraduate students. To introduce the concept of real-time control with real-time programming in a feedback-control laboratory course, a commercial software tool for a real-time operating system is adopted. Instead of using convenient graphical programming and automatic code generation methods, students in this course are required to write programs using C language to control and monitor analog dynamic simulators and experimental plants. Through step-by-step procedures, students are able to acquire the knowledge necessary for writing real-time programs to control dynamic systems.