Designing a Project-based Plant to Enhance Mechatronics Students for Self-learning Embedded Control System

Abstract

The feedback control system laboratory is required to enhance the knowledge of enrolled students. However, the apparatus provided by educational company usually is high cost, needs a high-performance computer and the professional instructor to conduct the experiment. In this paper, the designing of project-based learning for self-learning embedded control system is proposed. The low-cost experiment kits for microcontroller-based control can be alternately solution instead of using virtual or remotely experiment. In this work, two different types of plant systems: air levitation system and serial elastic actuator are presented. Both are easy to construct and able to implement the controller with any microcontroller. The real-time operation system for embedded system is also introduced which required for industrial control. Based on project-based approach, there are four stages guiding students and teacher to follow up the content and assessment so that the objective of embedded control learning can be achieved within 16 weeks.