A Hands-On Laboratory for Intelligent Control Courses

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Well written paper explaining how the pedagogical method should be adapted to help the learning of engineering students and helping them to also develop skills to design a complete control loop using fuzzy logic, explained thought a practical example of an exercise the authors used for it, as well as the rubrics for evaluations of the students.

The aspects below should be corrected:

In the abstract PID is introduced although it's not clear what it stands for 

Line 73: Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, the paper will improve significantly if the authors give more context information on why this organization is important for engineering education, and more contextual information on the importance to use and evaluate the student according to the requirements imposed by it (for instance I was not aware of it)

Maybe the authors can share briefly on their next steps of development in this area / direction?

Author Response

Reviewer 1. Well written paper explaining how the pedagogical method should be adapted to help the learning of engineering students and helping them to also develop skills to design a complete control loop using fuzzy logic, explained thought a practical example of an exercise the authors used for it, as well as the rubrics for evaluations of the students.

Thank you, we appreciate your comments.

The aspects below should be corrected:

• In the abstract PID is introduced although it's not clear what it stands for 

Thank you, we appreciate your comments. The term was introduced only as an example of classical control techniques. However, as it was not the central topic of the research and for clearer writing, it was removed from the section.

• Line 73: Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, the paper will improve significantly if the authors give more context information on why this organization is important for engineering education, and more contextual information on the importance to use and evaluate the student according to the requirements imposed by it (for instance I was not aware of it)

Thank you, we appreciate your comments. In order to provide the reader with a brief overview of           

the importance of the aforementioned accreditation, the following information is included:

“…the main contribution of the work represented in this document is that it proposes a specific tool and the method to evaluate the student according to the requirements requested by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET). This voluntary accreditation is the product of the collaboration of more than 2,000 professionals from 36 partner organizations. In addition, it has a high level of demand since its primary objective is to ensure that the engineering and science curricula comply with the global quality standards of the professions to which they are directed.”

• Maybe the authors can share briefly on their next steps of development in this area / direction?

The following paragraph was added to the document to offer a future overview of the application of fuzzy logic and thus highlight the importance of its use as part of the automatic control student practices.

“The main advantage of the application of fuzzy logic is the possibility of defining and including concepts or variables in an analysis, even when they are not precisely formulated. Although at present fuzzy logic has gained ground in the area of automatic control, there are still some limitations that must be resolved. Future work should be aimed at optimizing the learning time of the method, improving the interpretation of fuzzy values and developing a rigorous mathematical analysis that guarantees that the use of a fuzzy expert system results in a stable system. Therefore, the aforementioned aspects constitute possible points of improvement in the area.”

Reviewer 2 Report

This is a suitable manuscript that reflects different methods that may be applicable to engineering professionals. In general, it is an interesting study that may be of interest to the readers of the journal. However, the conclusions section is weak, the general limitations of the study should be added, as well as the practical applications and future lines of research derived from the research work carried out.

Author Response

Reviewer 2. This is a suitable manuscript that reflects different methods that may be applicable to engineering professionals. In general, it is an interesting study that may be of interest to the readers of the journal. However, the conclusions section is weak, the general limitations of the study should be added, as well as the practical applications and future lines of research derived from the research work carried out.

We appreciate your comments to enrich the scientific content of our work. In the new manuscript, the proper change was done. The conclusions were completely rewritten to emphasize the importance of each topic. The corrected section is shown below.

“Nowadays, the use of electric motors has increased considerably. In the industrial area, it is one of the most used final action elements. In this sector, the motors can be part of industrial fans, blowers, and pumps, machines, tools, etc. However, the use of these devices is currently not limited to the industrial area. The rise of renewable energies is driving the use of electric motors in the transport sector around the world. It is important that engineering students, specifically students in automatic control, are familiar with this type of actuator and its control.

The research presented addresses the control of a direct current motor by applying non-classical control techniques. In this way, the student acquires a broader panorama of the different methods that can be applied to control this type of device. Once the student successfully develops the proposed practice, they will be in a position to extrapolate the knowledge and skills acquired to a wide range of engines with similar characteristics. Although the motors can be of different shapes, sizes, power, etc., all are based on the same principle, the conversion of electrical energy into mechanical energy.

The objective of the student is to develop the project in a modular way, which is why it was divided into different practices. They sought in the same way to meet the necessary criteria for ABET certification. The results obtained prove that there is a slight improvement in the grades obtained by the students who took the course. In addition, due to the multidisciplinary nature of the project, the necessary skills are granted to work in a team, build their own acquisition cards without the need to buy trademarks, reinforce prior knowledge about programming languages, design of control loops, and mainly design and implementation of controllers with fuzzy logic.

It is important to note that the proposed project is a first approach to fuzzy controllers. However, it provides the necessary tools for the student to design their own controllers and experiment with different membership functions to improve system behavior. It is presumed that the disadvantages in indicators III and IV of Table 7 are due to the fact that the students of that period did not have adequate preparation in the subjects of programming, power circuits, microcontrollers and sensors. This leads to a deeper analysis of how to implement this methodology and how it could be improved to achieve better and more consistent results.”