Course program

Administration

Course responsible and lecturer is Karl-Erik Årzén (karlerik@control.lth.se).
Ladok administrator is Mika Nishimura Links to an external site. (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 Links to an external site.is assumed prior knowledge. 

Course discussion board – Piazza

We'll be conducting all class-related discussion in Piazza Links to an external site.. The quicker you begin asking questions on Piazza (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. The Piazza system is setup so that the teachers see your messages 8 hours after they have been posted. This is to encourage that you and your classmates help each other out before asking the teachers.

Course Representatives ("Kursombud")

The student representatives in the two courses are

FRTN01

FRTN60

  • TBD

 

Course Schedule

Link to Course Schedule in TimeEdit Links to an external site.

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)
    • B. Wittenmark, K.J. Åström, K-E Årzén, "Conputer-Control: An Overview", Educational version 2021, (available at KFS)
  • The lecture slides (on Canvas)
  • The Download exercises
  • The laboratory manuals

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

Schedule

The schedule for the Lectures  and the Exercises can be found on the corresponding Canvas pages. 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.

Covid-19 policy

Read about our general Covid-19 policy at the Department of Automatic Control Links to an external site..  Specifically, for this course:
  • There will be no office hours or spontaneous drop-ins at the department; instead, we will use Piazza.
  • All lectures will be given as on-line Zoom lectures only. The lectures will be recorded and made available in Canvas shortly afterwards. The lecture slides will also be available.
  • All exercises are also given through Zoom.
  • The same holds for the three laboratory sessions. Instead of using physical equipment you will control animated simulation models.
  • The projects will start in the beginning of Study Period 4. If the situation does not improve also these will be simulation-based and done from home. If the situation does improve we might consider offering physical projects.

Lectures

The lectures will be given as on-line zoom lectures. The zoom link for all lectures is https://lu-se.zoom.us/j/65055091063 Links to an external site. Each video will be recorded and published in Canvas as early as possible afterwards. We will publish the lecture slides a few days before each lecture. Please use the relevant topic in the discussion board to ask questions about anything that is unclear.

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 Claudio Mandrioli Links to an external site., Nils Vreman, and Albin Heimerson. Links to an external site.

 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. All exercises will be based on Zoom. There are two time slots for each exercise except for the extra exercises that only have one.

Laboratory experiments

The three laboratory sessions are mandatory and are supervised by Claudio Mandrioli Links to an external site., Nils Vreman, and Julian Salt Ducaju Links to an external site..  The labs will be held remotely, hence all of the work will be done individually and from home. Information for each lab will be posted around the assigned dates in the dedicated canvas page. The manuals will describe also how to submit your solutions.

Lab Approx. dates Responsible Content
Lab 1 Feb 15–19 Nils Implementation of a control system for the ball & beam process
Lab 2 Feb 22–26 Julian Sequence Control of a bead-sorter process
Lab 3 Mar 1-5 Claudio Fixed-point implementation of a DC-servo controller

 

Exam

A remote ordinary exam will be given on Saturday, March 20 at 08:00–13:00. Details about the practical arrangements will be given later. Retake exams are offered in April (April 7, 8-13) and August (August 21, 8-13).

Due to the corona situation, the remote exams this year will be open book exams, and all digital resources and tools will be allowed (but collaboration with others is of course strictly forbidden). Although Matlab might be useful to check some answers, all problems will be solvable by pen and paper and possibly a pocket calculator.

Matlab

Matlab (download link Links to an external site.) 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. An exception for this is the software used in Lab 2 that only runs under Java 8. For those of you that do not want to install Java 8 or have problems with this we provide a Oracle Virtual Box with Java 8 and the Lab 2 software pre-installed. This you can use for Lab 2 but you can also use it for the computer exercises if needed.

In Lab 1 and possibly also in the computer exercises 3-5 you will need support for JavaFX, the new Java GUI framework. JavaFX is part of Java 8. For later Java versions JavaFX needs to be installed separately. Instructions for this will be provided.