Learning modern design methods in the undergraduate control systems course

Each systems engineering major at the United States Naval Academy completes the linear control systems course sequence, with compensator design as the area of major emphasis in the second course in the sequence. The students learn a great deal about feedback control systems and their application, but they also learn about the design process. They experience first hand the frustrations associated with trial and error design. They learn to plan a project with milestones and deadlines. They learn to justify their results by careful analysis and by preparing formal reports on their work. Traditional analysis techniques learned by the undergraduate involve graphical plots of some mathematical function describing the system´s behavior, such as root locus, Bode, and Nyquist plots