Development of a Self-Balancing Human Transportation Vehicle for the Teaching of Feedback Control

Control systems education often needs to design interesting hands-on exercises that keep students interested in the control theory presented in lectures. These exercises include system modeling, system analyses, controller syntheses, implementation, experimentation, and performance evaluation of a control system. This paper presents an interesting pedagogical tool, a self-balancing human transportation vehicle (HTV), for the teaching of feedback control concepts in undergraduate electrical, mechatronic, and mechanical engineering environments. Such a pedagogical tool can be easily and inexpensively constructed using low-tech commercial components and feedback control approaches. The effectiveness and performance of the proposed HTV system are examined by conducting several experiments on three different terrains. An education process, together with a pedagogical method, is presented to show how the developed HTV can be incorporated into the laboratory course. To increase students´ hands-on experience and keep them interested in learning feedback control, this study also investigated how the enrolled students responded to this new pedagogical tool. This education method along with the HTV system is shown to be significantly effective in helping students to understand feedback control theory and practices, and also to result in more motivated and active learning.