The Control Systems Engineering Laboratory services the University’s practical teaching and research activities in the area of Automatic Control Engineering. The equipment infrastructure of the laboratory has recently been modernized through the project 'Modernizing the University of Malta's Control Systems Engineering Laboratory' which provided funding of around EUR 600,000 from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) under Cohesion Policy 2007-2013. This upgrade involves the acquisition and installation of state-of-the-art equipment to be used for both research and didactic purposes. The equipment focuses on modern automation technology including process control, mechatronics, robot control, programmable logic control, CAD tools for control system design, embedded control systems, vision-based automation and automatic access control.
The facilities in the laboratory include a set of industrial-standard Programmable Logic Control (PLC) units from Allen Bradley, together with the associated Human Machine Interface (HMI) terminals and programming software. The PLC units include digital and analogue input/output ports as well as Ethernet, ProfiBus and ASi modules for fieldbus communications. The laboratory houses a rich and varied set of robotic equipment including several modular robot assembly kits from LEGO Mindstorms with NXT and RobotC programming software, a team of Khepera III small-scale mobile robots, two high-end PowerBot mobile robot platforms from Adept MobileRobots, and two Catalyst-5 robotic arms with servo grippers and controllers. The equipment also includes a suite of advanced sensors for robotic applications including 6-axis force/torque sensors, laser rangefinders and inertial navigation sensors. In order to support the design and integration of complex systems, the laboratory is furnished with a number of embedded PCs, tablet PCs and several interface boards from dSPACE and Quanser for real time measurement and computer control. The facilities also include a set of PC interfaced dc servomechansims and liquid level process control units mainly to be used for didactic purposes. The laboratory equipment also covers the area of automated access control through the provision of fingerprint, palmprint and iris biometric scanning equipment. This is complemented by vision-based automation equipment which can be applied on robotic, automatic inspection and monitoring applications. These include analogue and digital area scan cameras, smart cameras with LED illumination, stereo cameras with pan/tilt actuation, and various digital and analogue video grabbers and camera multiplexers. All this equipment is supported by a backbone of standard electronic test and measurement instruments (oscilloscopes, powers supplies, signal generators), robust laboratory work benches, networked PC workstations, and Matlab/Simulink software licences for computer-aided analysis, design, simulation and real-time control of dynamic systems.
Access to the Control Systems Engineering Lab
In order to obtain access to the Control Systems Engineering Laboratory you may send an email to the functional mailbox sce.eng@um.edu.mt who will contact you back to obtain further information on the requested access.
Contact Address
Control Systems Laboratory
Room 429/430
Engineering Building
University of Malta
Msida MSD 2080
