Administration

Course responsible and lecturer is Karl-Erik Årzén (karlerik@control.lth.se).
Ladok administrator is Mika Nishimura (mika@control.lth.se).

Course registration

Do not forget to register that you are actually taking the course in Ladok. Also, please unregister from the course in Ladok and in Canvas if you decide to drop out before the first lab.

Prerequisites

FRTN05 Automatic Control, Basic Course is assumed prior knowledge.

Course discussion board – Discussions

We'll be conducting all class-related discussion in Discussions in Canvas. The quicker you begin asking questions on Discussions (rather than via emails), the quicker you'll benefit from the collective knowledge of your classmates and instructors. We encourage you to ask questions when you're struggling to understand a concept—you can even do so anonymously—and collaboratively (with your fellow students) come up with an answer.

Course Representatives ("Kursombud")

The student representatives in the two courses are

Hugo Persson, D, hugopersson7@gmail.com
Hugo Persson, M, hugobohult@gmail.com

Course Schedule

Link to Course Schedule in TimeEdit

Course material and literature

The course contents are defined by

The two course books
- K-E Årzén, "Real-Time Control Systems", 2015. (available at KFS and here)
- B. Wittenmark, K.J. Åström, K-E Årzén, "Computer-Control: An Overview", Educational version 2021, (available at KFS)
The lecture slides (on Canvas)
The exercises
The laboratory manuals

You may also have use for Automatic Control – Collection of Formulae (pdf) and Real-Time Systems Formula Sheet (pdf)

Schedule

The schedule for the course can be found on the Schedule page. The course is rather intense with several lectures and exercises per week. The three laboratories are performed in Study Period Week 5 (Lab1), Week 6 (Lab 2) and Week 7 (Lab 3). The FRTN01 students also have the possibility to do Lab 3 in the beginning of Study period 4.

Lectures

The lectures will given IRL.

Exercise sessions

The course contains two types of exercises: Problem-Solving Exercises (6 in total) and Computer Exercises (5 in total). All are voluntary. In addition there are one extra problem-solving exercise on Matlab and one extra-problem-solving lecture on basic Java. The exercises are given by Max Nyberg-Carlsson, Ahmed Al Bayati, Yde Sinnema, and Talitha Nauta.

The Computer exercise material will be available on the Exercise page in Canvas a few days before the exercise at the latest. The problem solving exercise material is already there. There are two time slots for each exercise except for the extra exercises that only have one.

For the computer exercises we, in addition to the exercise instructions and solutions found in the Course Weeks module, also provide a code skeleton for the individual computer exercises. The code skeleton can be downloaded here: ExerciseSkeleton.zip

Laboratory experiments

The three laboratory sessions are mandatory and are supervised by given by Ahmed Al Bayati, Yde Sinnema, and Max Nyberg-Carlsson Information for each lab will be posted around the assigned dates in the dedicated canvas page.

Lab	Approx. dates	Responsible	Content
Lab 1	Feb 17–21	Ahmed Al Bayati	Implementation of a control system for the ball & beam process
Lab 2	Feb 24–28	Talitha Nauta	Sequence Control of a bead-sorter process
Lab 3	Mar 3-7	Max Nyberg Carlsson	Fixed-point implementation of a DC-servo controller

Exam

The exam dates are

Monday 17th March, 14:00 - 19:00, Victoria
Friday 25th April, 14:00 - 19:00, MA10
Tuesday 19th August, 14:00 - 19:00, MA8

Matlab

Matlab (download link) is used in the third lab as well as in the problem-solving exercise sessions. The third lab will require Matlab 2019a or a more recent version, make sure your installation is compliant. We will use the following toolboxes:

Control System Toolbox
Simulink

Java

The code examples in the lectures and exercises are based on Java 8. It is very likely that they will work also in later versions of Java.