Educational software

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.