HKU Moodle

The main purpose of this course is to help students understand the management principles and prepare them with the necessary management tools for their future management roles.

Teaching Schedule of MECH4404 Automatic Control

January 2025-May 2025

Part One Continuous-time Control Systems with Transfer Function Based Design (15 hours)

Chapter A (6 hours = 4  hrs lecture + 2hrs tutorial) Control of Mechanical and Electrical Systems

Key words:  DC motor,  three spring and double mass system, PID control systems,  control system design using pole-assignment technique.

Chapter B (6 hours= 4hrs lecture +2 hrs tutorial) Linear System Analysis

Key words: one-degree and two degree of freedom control systems, sensitivity analysis, disturbance rejection, reference tracking,  measurement noise attenuation, Nyquist stability criterion 

Chapter C (3 hours = 2 hrs lecture +1 hr tutorial) Computer controlled system and PID Implementation

Key words: Discretization of PID controllers,  PID controller in position form, PID controller in velocity form, anti-windup mechanism.

Part Two Discrete-time Systems with State Space Design Techniques (24 hours)

Chapter  D (6 hrs=4hrs lecture+2hrs tutorial) Introduction to discrete-time systems

Key words: Sampling of continuous time systems, discrete state space models, stability of discrete-time systems, poles and zeros of discrete-time systems, shift operators, z-transforms 

Chapter E (6hrs=4hrs lecture+2hrs tutorial) Discrete-time state feedback control and state estimation

Key words: controllability, observability, state feedback controller design, observer design

Chapter F(6 hrs=4hrs lecture+2hrs tutorial) Discrete-time optimal control

Key words: Discrete-time linear quadratic regulator design, Riccati equation, linear quadratic regulator with prescribed degree of stability.

Chapter G (6 hrs=4hrs lecture+2hrs tutorial) Disturbance rejection and reference following  via estimator design

Key words: modelling of disturbances, disturbance observer, compensation of disturbance, anti-windup mechanism in control implementation

The assessment:

Practical work (20%)- we will do a large assignment, which involves the design, analysis and simulation of a complex system- sort of like a project.

Continue assessment (15%) we will use the performance from the tutorials

Final assessment 65%

About the lecturer

Professor Liuping Wang received her Ph.D degree in 1989 from the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering, University of Sheffield, UK. Upon completion of her PhD degree, she worked in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Toronto, Canada for eight years in the field of process control.   From 1998 to 2002, she worked in the Center for Integrated Dynamics and Control, University of Newcastle, Australia.  In February 2002, she joined the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, RMIT University, Australia where she is a Professor of Control Engineering since 2007.  She has authored and co-authored more than 400 scientific papers in the field of system identification, PID control, adaptive control, model predictive control, electrical drive control, sensor fusion and control technology applications to industrial processes. She is the author and the lead author of five books in the field of systems and control:

1.         State Feedback Control and Kalman Filtering with MATLAB/Simulink Tutorials (Co-authored with Dr Robin Ping Guan, publisher: Wiley-IEEE Presss 2022). This book was translated into Chinese and published by China Science Press in 2024.  It is used as a textbook in teaching ‘Modern Control Systems’ in Chinese universities and other universities around the world.

2.         PID Control System Design and Automatic Tuning using MATLAB/Simulink (Publisher: Wiley-IEEE Press 2020). This book was translated into Chinese and published by Tsinghua University Press in 2023.  It is used in teaching control courses for undergrauate courses and training industrial engineers in the universities and the companies around the world.

3.         PID and Predictive Control of Electrical Drives and Power Converters Using MATLAB/Simulink (Co-authored with Drs Shan Chai, Dae Yoo, Lu Gan, and Ki Ng, publisher: Wiley-IEEE Press, 2015);

4.         Model Predictive Control System Design and Implementation using MATLAB® (Publisher: Springer 2009). This book has been used as a textbook in teaching model predictive control in the universities around the world since 2009. The second edition of this book will be formally published as textbook by Springer in 2025.

5.         From Plant Data to Process Control-Ideas for Process Identification and PID Control (Co-authored with Professor Will Cluett, Taylor and Francis, 2000) 

Dr Liuping Wang is an editor of International Journal of Control, an associate editor of  Journal of Process Control and IEEE Transactions on Control System Technologies, and a Fellow of Institute of Engineers Australia.  She is an honary professor of Hong Kong University.