How are cars built?

Cars are such a common view we don't realize how much engineering and design efforts are behind them. Think how much cars (and the technology they incorporate) have change since the crude Model T Ford produced to any of the cars you can see today in the road: electronic control, ABS, cruise control.. there are even cars that park themselves!!!

But how are those features developed? Well, let me show an example. There is a number of companies working of a feature called "active suspension". Don't you know what I'm talking about? Check this video





But how is 'active suspension' design? It would be inconvenient to have a car on your desk to go trough the design process. One option is to build something similar but to a smaller scale. This is what Quanser has done. This portable plant simulates the action of the road over a wheel and the body of a car and allow users to design and test their algorithms with a real system before actually building a prototype on a areal car






And this is the Active Suspension working with LabVIEW and cRIO

Inverted Pendulum? Again?

Ever since I started to learn and work with control systems, the inverted pendulum has been around. It is a perfect example of an unstable system that "works" because a smart control engineer developed a control system right? But at the time I was in college I failed to see the applications of this systems. Recently you might have heard about the latest (in my mind) inverted pendulum application, the PUMA. Check it out



Well, I have this Love-Hate relationship with the inverted pendulum since I choose it for my master thesis. I learned, the hard way, there is more to control a system that just the control algorithm, but you have sensors, actuators, noise, non linearities, etc. You can actually check out the video



This was done long time ago, using C on a 486 running DOS (If you just understood what I wrote, you are over 30). Fortunately there are a number of tools available that make the whole control design and simulation much more faster. Check out this team of students as they develop something much better that mine in about four weeks, way faster of what I did