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An Undergraduate State-Space Theory Course with Emphasis on Designs

Chiu H. Choi, Ph.D., P.E.

Electrical Engineering Program Division of Engineering University of North Florida Jacksonville, Florida 32224

Abstract

A new approach of enhancing undergraduate engineering courses is proposed in this paper. The enhancement is the integration into the courses a wide range of practical design problems of which the solutions require in-depth knowledge of computational software package. This approach was tried on an undergraduate-level state-space theory course. The reasons for choosing this course were that the enrollment of this course had been low and the students who took this course before did not show much interest in the course contents. It was desired to investigate whether the new approach could increase the student’s enthusiasm about the course and the enrollment. The new approach put much emphasis on the applications of the theory to solve a wide range of control design problems using MATLAB®. The associated theorems of the theory and their proofs were still covered in the course. The evaluation indicated that the enhancement had significantly increased the students’ interest in the course and the enrollment. The design problems covered in the course included pole placement design using full-state feedback, full-order observer design, pole placement design using full-order observer, linear- quadratic regulator design, Kalman filter design, linear-quadratic Gaussian design. This design approach allowed the students to appreciate the application of the state-space theory at a deeper level. It is expected that enhancing a course with a wide-range of practical design problems will improve the teaching evaluation of the course significantly.

I. Introduction

Our students consider the undergraduate level state-space theory course as one of the hardest courses in the undergraduate electrical engineering curriculum. The course covers the basic methods for control system design and analysis using the state-space theory. Topics include linear algebra, review of dynamics, state-space modeling of control systems, time-domain responses of state space models, transformations, diagonalization, BIBO stability, asymptotic and marginal stability, controllability, observability, state feedback and pole placement, full- order observer design, reduced-order observer design, linear-quadratic regulator problem, Kalman filtering, linear-quadratic Gaussian problem, and the numerical solution of algebraic Riccati equations. Many of these topics are discussed in a number of textbooks such as [1], [2], [3], and [4].

“Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2005, American Society for Engineering Education”

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Choi, C. (2005, June), An Undergraduate State Space Theory Course With Emphasis On Designs Paper presented at 2005 Annual Conference, Portland, Oregon. 10.18260/1-2--14366