Design in an undergraduate controls laboratory

For the last seven years, the electrical engineering department has centered the undergraduate controls curriculum around the design of a controller that causes a second order system to meet a design specification. The students first characterize the performance of a second order system (a DC servomotor). Then they decide on the design specification that the system must meet. Next the students design and implement an analog controller in hardware. The semester finishes with the students repeating the design using a digital controller. This paper describes the experiences with this approach to a hardware oriented undergraduate controls laboratory and the problems that were encountered and solved.