Pocket-Sized Portable Labs: Control Engineering Practice Made Easy in Covid-19 Pandemic Times

P B de Moura Oliveira; Filomena Soares; Alberto Cardoso

doi:10.1016/j.ifacol.2022.09.272

Pocket-Sized Portable Labs: Control Engineering Practice Made Easy in Covid-19 Pandemic Times

IFAC Pap OnLine. 2022;55(17):150-155. doi: 10.1016/j.ifacol.2022.09.272. Epub 2022 Oct 6.

Authors

P B de Moura Oliveira¹, Filomena Soares², Alberto Cardoso³

Affiliations

¹ INESC-TEC, Department of Engineering, University of Trás-os-Montes and Alto Douro (UTAD), Vila Real, Portugal.
² Centro Algoritmi, Engineering School, University of Minho, 4800-058 Guimarães, Portugal.
³ Informatics Engineering Department, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal.

Abstract

New pocket-sized laboratories are proving to be an excellent tool as complementary equipment that students and lecturers can deploy to test control engineering design techniques. Here, the description and outcome results of an IFAC activity funded project entitled as Pocket-Sized Portable Labs: Control Engineering Practice Made Easy are presented. The project was executed in Portugal, from January 2021 to the end of June 2021, during the SARS-CoV2 pandemic. The global aim of this project was to motivate pre-university students to enroll in control engineering courses by showing and demonstrating that simple practical experiments may be easily accomplished using portable pocket-size laboratories.

Keywords: Arduino; Control Engineering Education; Portable Laboratories.