Location: 20-112
Coordinator: Dr. Art MacCarley
Facilities: EE 301/341 , EE 302/342, EE 432/472
Size: 1030
Average Number of Students a Year: 410
Utilization Ratio: 0.4
Description
This laboratory serves our basic lecture courses in systems and control, introducing students to a variety of concepts in signal analysis, servocontrol, open and closed loop system analysis, compensator design, and state variable feedback. Digital control system analysis and design are also taught, with an emphasis on linear discrete-time systems, robotics, electromechanical systems, and advanced nonlinear discrete-time controls. Many senior projects and special projects are also supported in this facility. All courses taught in this lab utilize the SIM342 integrated laboratory environment, written by Cal Poly faculty and students specifically for this facility. SIM342 runs on networked PCs with IEEE488 bus interfaces, to facilitate the importation and analysis of data from the digital oscilloscope and spectrum analyzer, for overlay and comparison capability with simulated and calculated results generated by the program. This fully integrated environment of electromechanical system analysis and design is constantly being improved and developed by faculty and staff, to provide the best possible laboratory educational environment.
Equipment Needs
Our equipment needs in this lab are extensive, in large part due the unusually large number of students and number of different lab courses conducted in this facility. The following acquisitions would be very helpful:
- Texas Instruments DSP boards ('DSK') and software development tools ('Code Composer Studio') for planned digital controllers, to be built in-house.
- PCI-bus analog control interface cards for PC's, to facilitate PC-based digital control experiments.
- PC-based computer vision components for vision-based robotic positioning experiments: 8 progressive scan video cameras, 8 real-time PCI frame grabbers, C++ Development Environment.
- Two instructional development PC's with multimedia capabilities, including video acquisition and editing capabilites.
- An extension of our 10-station licenses for Matlab and MatrixX.
- Various types of industrial robotic and similar electromechanical assemblies, especially those including computer vision components, for new digital control laboratory experiments.
- Nine analog-computer control simulators, such as the EB-6 series by Electrodynamic, Inc., to supplement the existing Motomatic rotational kinematic apparatuses.
- Basic electronic and mechanical hand tools for design and development of student robotic projects, such as our entires in the annaul IEEE Micromouse Competition (first place winners in regional competition, 1995 and 96), and Cal Poly's own Roborodentia competition.