I have always enjoyed relaying obtained knowledge to others11Those who followed my past endeavors would know my old website—I have published there several popular tutorials mostly related to embedded system design and microcontroller programming (in Russian language).. Perhaps it is no wonder then that I’ve ended up being an instructor for several courses in TalTech. During my student years I have developed software to facilitate learning and also shared some of that with my fellow students. This continued after I got my Ph.D. and started working in TalTech as a research scientist.
As head
Magnetic levitation system (MLS) in virtual reality. Click here to watch the demo video.
of Re:creation VR&AR laboratory, I’ve been developing the Control Objects in Virtual Reality project (link leads to the lab’s website). This is an educational/training application that uses the Simulink environment to compute the dynamics of certain control objects, and Unreal Engine 4 to visualize the resulting animations. Since this is a VR application, the user gains an immense benefit stemming from immersive qualities of the medium, including coherent interactions will all of the visualized objects since the simulation is running in real time.
Here’s a list of some of the other applications that I have developed and made publically available:
- BODEPID for MATLAB. This graphical application serves to visually show the relations of linear feedback system analysis concepts. Given a plant description22A model of an industrial object we wish to control, the user can interactively tune a P/PI/PID/PD controller and see how the changes in the parameters reflect an all related measures such as robustness, stability and dynamics.
- BODEFOPID for MATLAB33A. Tepljakov, E. Petlenkov, E. A. Gonzalez, and I. Petras, “Design of a MATLAB-based teaching tool in introductory fractional-order systems and controls,” in 2017 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE). 2017.. Extension that brings fractional-order PID controller design support to the BODEPID application.
- Basic Simplex method tutor. Simplex method is one of basic linear programming methods and knowledge of how it works is sufficiently important when studying related topics. Thus, obtaining step-by-step instructions for a certain class of linear programming problems is quite useful for checking manually obtained solutions. A working demo is available here: https://a‑lab.ee/edu/simplex/
In 2019, I have been awarded a teaching grant from TalTech. I use the available funds to continue creating quality educational software and publishing the results in related journals.