A low-cost didactic experiment for teaching adaptive filtering for automatic control

This paper presents a low-cost didactic experiment that aims to offer a practical and efficient approach to teaching adaptive filtering in control systems. In this study, the model-free adaptive filter proposed by Fortaleza et al. is adopted to introduce the students to adaptive filtering. Both a practical experimental protocol and an application model for an Arduino UNO are developed. To validate the protocol, a low-cost motor-tachogenerator module was used and the performance of the system without filter, with a linear first-order non-adaptive filter, and with the adaptive filter are compared. The illustrative results show the conclusions students can draw from the experiment, regarding the ease of use of a model-free adaptive filter and its positive effects regarding the reduction of actuator wear. Finally, it is argued that the presented experiment meets Balchen's requirements for a good practical experiment.