Control Systems in Practice, Part 9: The Step Response

This video covers a few interesting things about the step response. We’ll look at what a step response is and some of the ways it can be used to specify design requirements for closed loop...

System Identification Methods

System Identification is the process of determining the model or the equations of motion for your system. This is incredibly important because basing a control system design off of a bad...

Understanding PID Control, Part 4: A PID Tuning Guide

It can be difficult to navigate all the resources that promise to explain the secrets of PID tuning. Some proclaim that PID tuning is an art that requires finesse and experience, while...

System Identification Overview

System identification is a methodology for building mathematical models of dynamic systems using measurements of the input and output signals of the system.  This overview from Mathworks...

Introduction: PID Controller Design

In this tutorial we will introduce a simple, yet versatile, feedback compensator structure: the Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controller. The PID controller is widely employed...

Modeling Physical Systems, An Overview

This video sets the stage for the topics that I want to cover over the next month or two. This is an overview of how you go from a physical system to a linear model where you can design a...

Autonomous Navigation, Part 4: Path Planning with A* and RRT

This video explores some of the ways that we can use a map like a binary occupancy grid for motion and path planning. We briefly cover what motion planning means and how we can use a graph...

The AVA Flight Computer

This video describes the board design, hardware architecture, and software components of the All Vehicle Avionics (AVA) flight computer that was designed by Joe Barnard of BPS Space.  This...

Model Predictive Control

This lecture provides an overview of model predictive control (MPC), which is one of the most powerful and general control frameworks. MPC is used extensively in industrial control settings...

Reinforcement Learning for Engineers, Part 3: Policies and Learning Algorith...

This video provides an introduction to the algorithms that reside within the agent. We’ll cover why we use neural networks to represent functions and why you may have to set up two neural...

But what is the Fourier Transform? A visual introduction.

An animated introduction to the Fourier Transform.

Artificial Intelligence

This lecture discusses artificial intelligence (AI) in the context of data science and machine learning.

Trimming and Linearization, Part 1: What is Linearization?

Why go through the trouble of linearizing a model? To paraphrase Richard Feynman, it’s because we know how to solve linear systems. With a linear model we can more easily design a controller...

Discrete control #4: Discretize with the matched method

This is the fourth video on discrete control and in this video we are going to continue exploring the different techniques we can use to discretize a continuous system and talk about the...

Nyquist Stability Criterion, Part 1

An explanation of the Nyquist Stability Criterion. This video steps through the importance of the criterion, how to interpret the Nyquist plot graphically, and why it is the way it is....

Understanding Control Systems: The Disturbance Rejection Problem

This video provides a demonstration using a car to show how you can simulate open- and closed-loop systems in Simulink®.

First, you will learn how to model and tune open-loop systems. The...

A real control system - how to start designing

Let’s design a control system the way you might approach it in a real situation rather than an academic one. In this video, I step through a control problem and show how control theory is...

Linear Regression

Linear regression is a cornerstone of data-driven modeling; here we show how the SVD can be used for linear regression.

Extremum Seeking Control in Matlab

This lecture explores extremum-seeking control (ESC) on a simple example in Matlab. In particular, a discrete-time (digital) version of ESC is coded in a Matlab script.

Control Bootcamp: Kalman Filter Example in Matlab

This lecture explores the Kalman Filter in Matlab on an inverted pendulum on a cart.

ITSIE: An Interactive Software Tool for System Identification Education

ITSIE is an Interactive Tool for System Identification Education. The tool is developed using Sysquake, a Matlab-like language with fast execution and excellent facilities for interactive...

Control Systems in Practice, Part 4: Why Time Delay Matters

Time delays exist in two varieties: signal distorting delays, like phase lag, in which each frequency is delayed by a different amount of time, resulting in a distorted signal shape; and non...

How Kalman Filters Work, Part 1

This article looks at four popular estimation filter architectures: particle filter, sigma point filter, extended Kalman filter, and the Kalman filter. It discusses how all four of these...

Discrete control #3: Designing for the zero-order hold

This is the third video on discrete control and in this video, I want to clear up a confusion that I caused last time regarding using the ZOH method to discretize a continuous controller and...

Understanding Control Systems: Components of a Feedback Control System

This video introduces the components of a feedback control system and how they interact with each other.  

Learn basic terminology by walking through examples that include driving a car...