Teaching control engineering using the Control Kit

Presents information on a software package developed for use by students in a first course in control systems. Although the package was developed for students´ use, it has also been purchased by industrialists, since, like students, they are much happier if they can solve their problems with a minimum amount of programming. The flexibility provided by the package has been found satisfactory for many simple industrial applications. Many users of control engineering software are not using the software continuously and, therefore, any approaches which make the software easier to use are particularly useful. The philosophy adopted of making packages available in MATLAB which tackle specific problems has been found particularly attractive, since many control analysis and design problems often relate to consideration of a specific structure but with different plant and other data. Additional packages have been developed to study such topics as simple aspects of nonlinear control, model reduction and PID controller design