Towards a Hands-On Lab: SISO Plants for Introductory Courses in Automatic Control

This article presents a set of experimental plants built as platforms for the design and implementation of SISO controllers. As a premise, the plant should be low cost and easy to be put together by students under the paradigm of take-home-labs, or affordable and using readily available components in order to be built and shared in an engineering course. Each plant represents or emulates common problems found in industrial environments, with a difficulty appropriate to laboratory practices within engineering degree programs. Here, seven plants are built, detailing the requirements for their construction, operating conditions, and possible areas of application. To provide proof of concept, some experimental examples regarding identification procedures and control design and implementation are presented.