A control engineering laboratory based on a low-cost non-linear plant

A real-time control laboratory is presented here. The experiments are based on a non-linear plant and are oriented to undergraduate courses on digital control and intelligent control The strategies proposed are both classical and intelligent techniques. Thus, the students can compare, on the real plant, the results obtained with both approaches. The control problem is to eliminate the load oscillations in a transport crane. To solve this problem the students will apply a classical state feedback controller and then will improve this algorithm with intelligent techniques based on neural networks (NN) and fuzzy logic (FL). The experiments are carried out on a low-cost scale prototype.