MECH&AE 171B
Digital Control of Physical Systems
Description: Lecture, four hours; discussion, two hours; outside study, six hours. Enforced requisite: course 171A or Electrical Engineering 141. Analysis and design of digital control systems. Sampling theory. Z-transformation. Discrete-time system representation. Design using classical methods: performance specifications, root locus, frequency response, loop-shaping compensation. Design using state-space methods: state feedback, state estimator, state estimator feedback control. Simulation of sampled data systems and practical aspects: roundoff errors, sampling rate selection, computation delay. Letter grading.
Units: 4.0
Units: 4.0
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Most Helpful Review
Fall 2025 - This class is super disorganized. The "labs" are all based on a seemingly decades old document, and require you to remote into a laptop to collect data. There were lots of issues with remote laptops not working for data collection. Also, the homework and lab assignments are both super unclear. It is hard to determine what exactly you need to do, you're given little snippets of the solution with no context and expected to come up with the rest yourself, whatever that may mean. I spent more time figuring out what exactly to do than actually doing it. The assignments took an incredibly long time and honestly made my quarter miserable. It really seemed like the professor didn't care too much that students were struggling to keep up with the disorganized workload. The material isn't hard per se, it's mostly an extension of 171A and some concepts of 270A/B. If you've taken MAE 172, that is quite helpful to take before this since Prof. M'Closkey does a much better job explaining signal processing and sampling than Prof. Tsao.
Fall 2025 - This class is super disorganized. The "labs" are all based on a seemingly decades old document, and require you to remote into a laptop to collect data. There were lots of issues with remote laptops not working for data collection. Also, the homework and lab assignments are both super unclear. It is hard to determine what exactly you need to do, you're given little snippets of the solution with no context and expected to come up with the rest yourself, whatever that may mean. I spent more time figuring out what exactly to do than actually doing it. The assignments took an incredibly long time and honestly made my quarter miserable. It really seemed like the professor didn't care too much that students were struggling to keep up with the disorganized workload. The material isn't hard per se, it's mostly an extension of 171A and some concepts of 270A/B. If you've taken MAE 172, that is quite helpful to take before this since Prof. M'Closkey does a much better job explaining signal processing and sampling than Prof. Tsao.
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