A laboratory course in real-time software for the control of dynamic systems

Abstract

This paper describes a laboratory course in real-time software for dynamic systems control. In the first part of the course, real-time concepts employed by modern real-time operating systems are taught with laboratory assignments. In the second part, students are required to write real-time software for dynamic systems control using the concepts that they learned in the first part. Real-time programming is usually avoided in teaching a feedback control laboratory course, since it has generally been considered difficult. However, student evaluation results for this course show that real-time programming can be successfully included in a feedback control laboratory course. From this course, students are able to obtain working knowledge of both real-time concepts and realtime programming for dynamic systems control.