In the previous "intermediate control" blog post series, we highlighted the Ball and Beam and Magnetic Levitation systems as a great way to introduce the advanced control concepts without requiring students to use state-space techniques. Another great plant to use...
For some twenty years, Quanser Shake Tables are helping civil engineering students grasp complex concepts of structural dynamics and earthquake engineering more quickly and thoroughly. Engaging, hands-on experiments allow them to leap past dry theory and 'experience' an earthquake in...
When attending this year's American Control Conference (ACC), one of the special sessions caught my attention. The National Science Foundation (NSF) invited junior faculty and researchers to a presentation titled “Getting Funded by NSF: Proposal Preparation and the Merit Review Process”...
In introductory control system courses, the analysis is typically done in the S-domain using transfer functions, and the advanced control courses introduce students to the state-space modeling and state-feedback control techniques. But quite often, instructors are caught in the mid-range...
In the previous blog post, we introduced the computation and communication software architecture of the Autonomous Vehicles Research Studio and showed how it could be applied in a swarm configuration. From homogeneous to heterogeneous vehicles with the same control architecture...
The challenge for many professors and instructors teaching a control systems course is to find practical, easy-to-use, and well-documented hands-on devices that could help make the theoretical concepts more concrete. In the introductory control system courses, the analysis is typically...
A couple of months ago, I co-authored a whitepaper presenting why thinking (computation) and talking (communication) are two vital tenets of a swarm ecosystem. Furthermore, the whitepaper provided some common approaches to implementing computation as well as communication frameworks within...
Working at Quanser for a long time, drones became an everyday thing to me, long before they started appearing in the hobby-stores, on the daily news, or in the parks. But watching a recent presentation by the company founder and...
Over the past eight months, I’ve worked on the development of the Autonomous Vehicles Research Studio as part of the mechanical engineering team. We engineers design, test, and then constantly improve our work by iterating on the design at hand....
For the past year, I've been developing the software and control architecture for drones as an Unmanned Systems Engineer at Quanser. When I started, I only had one concept down right - the mapping between the motors and the degrees...
