TEACHING PORTFOLIO
Core Competency 5
Mentored Teaching Project
I delivered a lecture to ME 451 senior students at MSU in Fall 2019 on “Tuning of PID controller for Cruise Control System” and developed the mentored project based on this lecture. The course instructor in that semester was Dr. Hamidreza Modares.
Summary of the Mentored Project
This mentored project aimed to help students gain the skill of tuning the three PID controller gains. To achieve a certain desired system response, students shall have a good understanding of how these gains affect the system response in terms of the transient response specifications such as the overshoot and the rise time.
In Fall 2019, I delivered a lecture to ME-451 senior students on tuning of the PID controller gains. First, I demonstrated to the students a concrete example where I modeled an automotive cruise control system using MATLAB/Simulink. After which I showed to the students how the open loop response cannot satisfy the desired system response. I then demonstrated the closed loop control through a PID controller and showed both manual and automatic tuning procedures where the variation of the PID gains demonstrated the effect on the system response.
After this demonstration, I asked the students to download an iOS/Android application called “Experience Controls” – that is recently released by Quanser- on their phones. The application allowed them to run a simulation of a robotic arm where they were able to tune the three controller gains and see the effect through a robotic arm animation. Students were then asked four questions through the applications that assessed their understanding of the effect of the PID controller gains on the system response.
Artifacts
Teaching and Learning Goal
The skill that I want the students to acquire is the understanding of the effect of the PID controller gains on the system response through the tuning process. The PID Controller is very famous industrial controller for different physics systems. The effect of each PID gains, namely the proportional, integral, and derivative has different effect on the system behavior in terms of rise time, overshoot, and the steady-state error.
Teaching Question
Can the students gain good comprehension of the effect of each parameter change on the system response by observing the full process of modeling, simulation, and control of a real-life world example such as the cruise control system using MATLAB? The lecture will be given through ME 451 Control Systems undergraduate class where the PID controller is one of major stones of the course syllabus.
Assesement
What instrument are you going to use to collect information? Students will download a recently released app called ‘Experience Controls’ on their phones that is available on both iOS and Android. The app will allow them to run a simulation of a robotic arm where they will be able to change the three controller gains and observe the robotic arm system behavior. Students will be asked four questions through the app that assess their understanding. They will answer the questions through their phones and their responses will show up as a real time feedback on the projector screen though Mentimeter.
Is it simple enough that you know how to analyze the results? The results will be simply analyzed to give the percentage of the students who answered the question correctly.
Will the information it provides answer the teaching question? The information will provide an answer to the teaching question whether the students have gained understanding of the how the PID controller parameters affect the system response.
Classroom Practice
What assignment or activity are you going to use in the class to try to test the question? Students will download a recently released phone app called ‘Experience Controls’ on both iOS and Android that is released by Quanser. The app will allow them to run a simulation of a robotic arm where they will be able to tune the three gain PID controller parameters. Students will then be asked four questions through the app that will allow them to change the PID parameters in the simulation and observe the effect on the system response. They will then answer the questions through a real time feedback website that I have added the same four questions to it beforehand. The responses will show up in real time on the projector screen. All the students will see the count each answer got in real time without knowing who answered what.
When are you going to do it? In a 50 min lecture I will give to the students.
Who will conduct it? The students.
Will it be graded? No.
Will it be anonymous, or will students sign their names? The website that collect the answers does not disclose the student’s names and it is anonymous. It will not be graded but I will get the percentage of the right answer.
How long will it take? Around 15 min.
How will students know what to do with it? Who will explain it? I will explain to the students all the steps needed to download the app, run the simulation, change the PID controller gains and answer the questions through Mentimeter.
How will the relationship between this assignment and activity and the course be explained? The assignment and activity correlates very well with the course as both focus on tuning and understanding the effect of the PID controller gains on the system response.
Data
The four bar plots below show the students’ answers collected by Mentimeter platform. Each bar plot graph shows the multi choice answers and the right answer marked in a black box below the correct bar answer. The bottom right corner shows the number of students participating in the class and submitted their answers using their phones. In all the questions, the majority of the students achieved the correct answer. In addition, the percentage of the students who answered the questions correctly increased from question 1 thru question 4.
Question 1
Question 2
Question 3
Question 4
Summary of the Results
The assessment tells me that it is effective to teach the students the effects of the PID controller gains through implementing the system model and control in MATLAB in front of them and not showing the final product as one shot. The information also tells me that the students gain better understanding by proceeding from question one thru question four where the percentage of the students who answered the questions correctly increased significantly from 53% to 57% to 87% to 96%.
Conclusions/Findings
The assessment demonstrated several important findings
- Students were highly engaged with the teaching style of demonstrating the the effects of the PID controller gains through modeling and simulating the system in MATLAB/Simulink
- Students like to see real life examples such as the cruise control system. They also like to observe the whole process of system modeling, simulation, and then control
- The students gained better understanding by proceeding from question one thru question four where the percentage of the students who answered the questions correctly increased significantly from 53% to 96%
- The students were highly engaged and involved in interacting with the iOS/Android app to simulate the robotic arm and answer the questions provided. They were very excited while answering the questions. At the end of the lecture they all applauded
- If I would do this again, I would bring more real-life examples to the students and focus on using more high-tech tools to engage them and keeping them involved. Additionally, I would focus more in letting the students use the “Experience Controls” app to tune the PID controller gains themselves for more understanding and comprehension