Abstract:
The goal of this thesis is to develop a direct controller for the control systems research laboratory that can be easily programmed and debugged so that a new control algorithm can be readily implemented. This controller should also have many useful features such as TCP/IP networking, multi-user and multi-tasking support. The other objective is to develop a data acquisition program to use with the laboratory equipment. We choose an operating system called RT-Linux, which is a real-time operating system that has all above features, and is freely distributed. We begin with the study of real-time systems and the internal working of the RT-Linux. The thesis includes the library for proper control laws and a controller, as case study, using the proposed library. Finally we demonstrate the actual implementation of the developed controller for some laboratory equipment.