Course description
Control systems, both human-made and natural, are an integral part of modern life. Space shuttles, machining processes, and hormonal regulation all rely on automatically controlled systems. Throughout this course, you will build the fundamental skills to analyze and design feedback systems that have the desired behavior, which you can use in a career as a control systems engineer—or in your senior design project.
Learning objectives
- Identify design objectives for control systems, and choose appropriate analysis techniques to meet each one;
- Model electrical, mechanical, and electromechanical systems using block diagrams and signal-flow graphs;
- Represent systems in the frequency domain by finding the transfer function, or in the time domain using a state-space approach;
- Investigate the stability of a system;
- Analyze and design elements of a system’s transient response;
- Analyze the steady-state error of a system for different input forms; and
- Use root-locus techniques to design for stability and desired transient response.
For more information, please see the 2017 course syllabus.