Welcome to control systems! I hope that you will find this introductory course a valuable part of your tuition as an engineer.  This module is a core engineering module for Electrical-Electronic, Computer-Electronic, Mechanical, Industrial, Electro-mechanical and Mechatronic engineers.

This module should not be seen as an electrical or electronic course.  It is completely a multi-disciplinary module. It can rather be considered as an applied mathematics module since it integrates mathematics with engineering disciplines and information sciences.

Control systems form an integral part of nearly any system or sub-system that you will design and develop during your career as an engineer. Many times it is called a "hidden technology", meaning that it integrates systems in such a seamless way that you don't even realize it is there. Just take a flight in a commercial airplane as an example, do you think about how many control loops are in action during your flight?

Before you can design a control system you need to understand the system's dynamic behavior. Dynamic system models allow us to characterize the performance of engineering systems in order to design control systems strategies. Modern technologies such as Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and soft computing also play a major role in modern control system design. In the engineering world these technologies are integrated in a general term called Industry 4.0. We will discuss this and more during this module.