Roadmap / Applications
Control Engineering
Motors, drones, thermostats: anything that must follow a target accurately is control.
Goal Choose PID gains from reasoning, not guesswork.
- 01Open loop and closed loop3D lab
Feedback means measuring the result and feeding it back into the input.
- 02System modelling
Describing motors, RC circuits and temperature as first- and second-order systems.
- 03Laplace transform and transfer functions
Turning differential equations into multiplication and division.
- 04Block diagrams
Connecting systems as blocks and reducing them.
- 05Time response3D lab
Overshoot, settling time, steady-state error: the common language of performance.
- 06PID control3D lab
P reacts to present error, I to accumulated error, D to its rate of change.
- 07Stability
Why raising the gain leads to oscillation and divergence, seen through pole positions.
- 08Frequency response and Bode plots
Judging stability with phase margin and gain margin.
- 09Digital control
Sampling period, discretization, and anti-windup against integrator saturation.
- 10A taste of state space
The starting point of modern control: handling several states at once.
Tune PID gains by hand
In the PID lab, find gains with overshoot under 10% and the shortest settling time, and write down why.
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