Designing and Constructing an Educational Apparatus for Control of Motion

Abstract

Control science is one of the most important sciences to understand well, one of the most important problems facing students at the university is not supporting the theoretical information with Practical experiments because these experiments are limited to laboratories due to the difficulty of moving devices from one place to another place. The purpose of this project is to build an educational control apparatus that fulfills several requirements as light weight, modularity, and easy to assembly. Components of the model, its mechanism and applications have been examined to meet the desired specifications. It was designed to consist of a servo motor, servo driver, Data acquisition (DAQ) and computer. Programming a controller by Simulink Matlab and then sends the digital signal to the DAQ to convert a digital signal to an analog signal, the driver received the signal and provide signal for the servo motor and the servo motor provides motion for the applications as pendulum, inverted pendulum, and crank slider. In this graduation project we designed and constructed the educational apparatus and applied the pendulum application and document its results. Where Several requirements have been achieved such as light weight and flexible for applications (can add another applications) while the apparatus is not portable because we faced many problems to interface between servo driver and Matlab software.