Industry needs for embedded control education

The rapidly growing embedded control industry has created a need for engineers whose training extends across the traditional pedagogical boundaries. To address this challenge, courses in embedded control systems have been created at the University of Michigan and at Carnegie Mellon University. These courses have in common a hardware laboratory based on the MPC555 microcontroller used to implement force feedback algorithms to enable a human to interact with a computer through a haptic interface. In this paper we describe the pedagogical challenges posed by the embedded control field, the hardware laboratory used at Michigan and Carnegie Mellon, and the individual courses that use this laboratory.