Animated emulations for illustrating adaptive control principles

The importance of hands-on learning in undergraduate and advanced control courses is indisputable. Unfortunately, a laboratory platform which allows multiple control methods to be applied to different systems can easily cost several tens of thousands of dollars per setup, making the development of a laboratory with several experimental stations prohibitively expensive for most universities. A more viable option is to use computers, which are fast, flexible, easy to use, and widely available on most campuses, to simulate real world systems. This paper details such a system which has been developed using MATLAB, to emulate the performance of a direct model reference adaptive controller as applied to a liquid level system and an inverted pendulum on a moving cart. These emulations have been very effective for illustrating the advantages of adaptive controllers in the presence of unknown and/or changing system parameters.