Education - A High School-Level Course in Feedback Control - A Matlab-Based Introduction Requiring Only Algebra and Trigonometry

This article presents an overview of an introductory course on feedback control amenable to traditional and nontraditional audiences. The course material is based on fundamental concepts in dynamical systems, modeling, stability analysis, robustness to uncertainty, feedback as it occurs naturally, and the design of feedback control laws to engineer desirable static and dynamic response. The course also includes an introduction to Matlab, provides Matlab exercises to reinforce concepts, and concludes with the design and application of a controller to achieve wall tracking with a kinematic robot experiment. The only prerequisite for the course is high school algebra, including basic trigonometry