Practical Education for Control Engineers at the Grenoble Polytechnic Institute

This paper describes the practical education that is given at the Grenoble Polytechnic Institute in the recently created section of control engineering. A set of laboratories in the main areas of the curriculum is briefly presented: control of continuous systems, logic, microprocessors and real-time systems, and signal processing. Specific emphasis is placed upon the fact that this mode of teaching is complete in itself, and that the interrelationship of different experiments becomes more and more important as the academic session progresses. The practical education is supplemented by a three-month period in industry where students are generally given good opportunities for synthesizing the various facets of their technical knowledge.