Jorge Cortes, William B. Dunbar
12/31/2006 09:00 AM
Applied Mathematics & Statistics
This paper presents an overview of a recently designed and implemented introductory course on feedback control amenable to traditional and nontraditional audiences. The course material is based on fundamental concepts in dynamical systems, modeling, stability analysis, robustness to uncertainty, feedback as it occurs naturally, and the design of feedback control laws to engineer desirable static and dynamic response. The material also includes an introduction to MATLAB, provides many MATLAB exercises to reinforce concepts, and concludes with a control design and simulation-based analysis to achieve wall tracking with a kinematic robot. The only prerequisite for the course material is high school algebra. All course material is freely available online at http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~jcortes/controlcrashcourse
