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Projects in Automatic Control

This is an advanced project course that gives 7.5 credits. The course is given during the second study period of the spring term. See the course syllabus for more information.

Course kick-off

A mandatory introductory meeting will be held on Monday March 14th, 12:15, 2011, in the seminar room of the Department of Automatic Control (M-building, second floor). During the meeting, a presentation of the course and the project will be given.

Slides from introductory meeting.

Group assignments 2011.

Course coordinator
Johan Åkesson (tel 046-2228797, email: johan.akesson@control.lth.se)

Assistants
Martin Hast (email: martin.hast@control.lth.se)
Mikael Lindberg (email: mikael.lindberg@control.lth.se)
Magnus Linderoth (email: magnus.linderoth@control.lth.se)
Jerker Nordh (email: jerker.nordh@control.lth.se)

Important dates

  • Monday March 14 A mandatory introductory meeting will be held on Monday March 14th, 12:15 in the seminar room of the Department of Automatic Control (M-building, second floor). During this meeting the projects will be presented in more detail. At the meeting, or later during the day, course participants are encouraged to hand in suggestions for project groups and project assignments by e-mail to Johan Åkesson. Proposals for project groups should contain the name of the group members, their respective programs and year of admittance and an ordered list of desired project selections.
  • Tuesday March 15 Project groups and project assignments will be posted on the home page.
  • Friday March 18 Deadline for handing in project plans to project supervisors.
  • Tuesday May 24 14:00-17:00 Project presentations, seminar room.
  • Tuesday May 24 17:00-18:00 Project demonstrations, course labs.
  • Friday May 27 Final report dead-line.

Tutorials

In the beginning in the course, tutorials will be offered in order to provide information needed to get started with the projects. Some tutorials are relevant for all groups, whereas other are dedicated to specific topics relevant only to some projects.

All:

Modelica/Dymola projects:

Fixed-point implementation:

Subversion and Trac

In order to support and faciliate the colloborative group effort, each group will have access to a version controlled repository and a project home page for project planning and management. Subversion will be used as version control system and the web-based software project management tool Trac will be used to plan and coordinate the projects. If you are new to Trac and subversion, please check out the Subversion book, in particular Chapters 1 and 2 and the Trac user's guide.

Project plan

Each project group is required to hand in a project plan on Friday March 19 to their respective project supervisor. The plan should contain:
  • An overview of the project.
  • Descriptions of the key parts of the project, including materials and methods to be used.
  • A decomposition of the project into sub tasks and a suggested allocation of the project resources to key tasks.
  • A time plan

Some useful hints for the project planning and execution

  • Break project into managable subtasks
  • Establish dependencies between subtasks
  • Estimate time required each subtask (manhours/days)
  • For each week estimate how many hours every member of the team will work
  • Plan deadlines for each subtask using the estimates above
  • Put any spare time you might have in the end of the schedule, not the beginning!
  • Every week follow up on your progress compared to your timeplan, and reschedule if you are falling behind.
The plan should be detailed enough to track weekly progress. The project material will be available in the lab from Tuesday March 15, and all project groups are encouraged to use this opportunity during the preparation of the project plan.

Feedback Seminars

Three mandatory feedback seminars are held in the course, each seminar with a dedicated theme: Modeling, Design or Implementation. The idea is to create a forum for where different topics which are part of most projects in the course are discussed and where the course participant share their experience and give feedback to each other.

In preparation for a feedback seminar, each group is required to hand in a written summary of their results with respect to the theme of the seminar. Typically, such a written summary becomes part of the final report.

In addition to the written summary, each group is required to prepare an oral presentation (approx. 10 minutes) reporting the project status and lessons learnt. During each seminar, 3-4 groups (not all groups) will perform their presentation.

During the seminars, all participants are encouraged to take part in the discussion by providing comments and feedback on his/hers peer's work.

  • Feedback seminar 1: Modeling (LP week 4, Wednesday April 6th 10:15-12:00)
  • Feedback seminar 2: Desig (LP week 5, Friday April 15th 10:15-12:00)
  • Feedback seminar 3: Implementation (LP week 7, Wednesday May 18th 10:15-12:00)

Final Report

The final report should describe the problem, the methods used, and the results. The report should be clearly written and nicely typeset and document the project in such way that a reader may reproduce the work from the contents. The target readers are students with similar background as the course participants. For inspiration, please see the example report from last years course.

The final report is due on Friday May 27.

Presentation and Demonstration

The course is ended with a public presentation (20 minutes including 3-5 minutes for questions and discussion) and demonstration of the project. The oral presentations should describe the problem, the methods used, and the results. A Windows XP PC with Acrobat Reader and Microsoft Powerpoint and video projector will be available.The project presentations will be held on Tuesday May 24 at 14:00-17:00 in the seminar room of the Department of Automatic control.

The demo session will be held in association with the presentations, on Tuesday May 24 at 17:00-18:00 in the course labs.

Examination

For course credits it is required to participate in the project work and the feedback seminars, to hand in a final report, and to give a final presentation and demonstration.

Course material

Links