Interactivity in automatic control: foundations and experiences

Abstract

The first part of this paper presents the concepts of interactivity and visualization and its essential role in learning the fundamentals and techniques of automatic control. More than 10 years experience of the authors in the development and design of interactive tools dedicated to the study of automatic control concepts are also exposed. The second part of the paper summarizes the main features of the “Automatic Control with Interactive Tools” text that has been recently published by Pearson and whose aim is to provide a series of auto-contained tools allowing to learn different basic concepts related to the automatic control. The work has been focused on how to represent the main concepts and how to formulate them according to learning based on examples.