A RAPID 1st course in Modelling, dynamics and control

Rapid summaries and overviews of a 1st course. Useful for motivation and getting started and also for revision. Viewers are advised to go through the material on the home page first.  Note that the interactive resources to aid learning require access to MATLAB software.

Material is arranged in the following manner.

1. Core resources are the videos and PDF files. These give rapid summaries of the core concepts.

2. Interactive resources allow students to try out the core concepts (these mostly use MATLAB, sections 6.8 and 6.9 are the most relevant).

3. Further resources direct viewers to the main chapters where slower videos, more detailed PDFs, tutorial sheets and other resources are available.

FINAL REMARKS: The above course has omitted numerous topics which some institutions may wish to include. This has been done to keep the content to something like a 20-30 hr lecture block and assuming no pre-requisite learning. It is taken as implicit that suitable laboratory activities are also included.

Where students already have more pre-requisites or more lecture space, it is possible to add important topics such as:

• Discrete control and computer implementation.

• More emphasis on handling uncertainty.

• Instrumentation and hardware (e.g. sensors, actuators).

• More advanced models (e.g. non-linearity, state-space methods) and a broader range of engineering scenarios.

• Data based modelling and decision making and future trends (e.g. AI techniques such as machine learning).

Obviously priorities will differ depending upon the design and content of the rest of the curriculum. Viewers may note that modern consensus is that frequency response methods are considered a lower priority, albeit useful in a second course.