A Semi-Physical Simulation Experiment System for Automatic Control Education

Automatic control theory is an important professional course of the automation and correlation specialties. This course is not pure theoretical, but practical for its close relationship with practical industrial automation systems design and implementation. Experiment plays an irreplaceable role in the process of the whole course learning. Most of traditional experiments for automatic control theory are pure simulated process. Furthermore, the experiment items are mainly demonstrated or confirmatory. This sort of experiment can be considered as another kind of class exercise. Students cannot get knowledge and technical ability in this way. A hardware-in-the-loop simulation experiment system based on MATLAB/RTW (Real-Time Workspace) is introduced in this paper. The software is open sources based on MATLAB. The hardware includes a PCI multi-purpose data acquisition card and an experimental box including analog circuit. According to the experiences of more than 5 years application, this semi-physical system is effective to attract student's interests. And through laboratory experiments education, understanding of the theory concept and practical ability are improved. An experiment teaching method based on experiential learning theory is also introduced.