Evaluation of an Online Inverted Pendulum Control Experiment

This paper presents an evaluation of the inverted pendulum experiment in control engineering from a statistical and pedagogical point of view. Student usage statistics and success rates were collected over a period of three years at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. The results in the paper show that an online experiment can both increase student satisfaction and success rate while decreasing the costs to the university associated with a traditional laboratory setup. In particular, the number of laboratory benches has been reduced from seven to one. At the same time the number of laboratory contact hours for the course administrator was more than halved.