M. Schlegel

Raspberry Pi and Arduino Boards in Control Education

Abstract Nowadays the control education usually heavily relies on the available simulation packages and virtual laboratories, both of which have their irreplaceable position in the educational process. But unfortunately the closed loop experiments are way too often limited to these virtual domains and the students lack the physical feedback about the impact of control algorithms and its parameters. The reasons might be the price of the hardware setup to demonstrate the control algorithms physically or a complicated transition from simulation to real-time platform. This paper describes an extremely inexpensive, straightforward and surprisingly powerful platform for implementation of real-time control algorithms. The platform consists of an Arduino board and a Raspberry Pi running the REX Control System. The Arduino board is used for interaction with the physical world via its inputs and outputs. The REX Control System allows the students to develop and verify the control algorithms in Simulink and then run it in real-time by a few mouse clicks. However, the REX Control System is by no means dependent on Simulink, it is fully functional even if Simulink license is not available. The platform further bridges the gap between the virtual and physical worlds as it is tightly connected to PIDlab.com and Contlab.eu portals, which makes it an ideal choice for control education purposes.

ADVANCED CONTROL ALGORITHMS + SIMULINK COMPATIBILITY + REAL-TIME OS = REX

Abstract This paper describes the structure and features of a new industrial control system called REX. During the system design, special attention was paid to the simulation facility of the control algorithms. The equivalent behavior of simulation and real-time control is guaranteed by a large function blocks library which is implemented for both Simulink and each target platform. REX is suitable for building real-time control systems of real, virtual and remote laboratories. REX does not utilize Real Time Workshop by The Mathworks.

ROBUST DESIGN OF SMITH PREDICTIVE CONTROLLER FOR MOMENT MODEL SET

Abstract The paper presents a simple and systematic procedure for automatic tuning of dead time compensating controllers (DTC). It integrates a simple identification experiment providing process characteristic numbers and a robust design method for an exactly defined model family. This family contains all transfer functions having (a) the given a priori form of lag/dead time transfer function (b) the experimentally obtained moment characteristic numbers. The independently interesting result of this paper is the explicit description of the value set for the model family.