Raspberry Pi-based HIL simulators for control education

Abstract

Excluding hands-on experience with physical systems from control education is tempting in many aspects, but at the same time it is very dangerous. This paper explainswhy and recommends a compromise between demanding maintenance of physical systems for students to control and relying on pure numeric simulations within the whole curriculum. The golden mean might be the use of real-time simulators with physical inputs and outputs, i.e. hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulators. Three examples of HIL simulators are presented, covering a coupled tanks model, a quarter-car model and a nuclear reactor model.