Toaster: One of the simplest and most common control systems you will nd in any kitchen is the simple

toaster. One question that you may have asked yourself at some point in your life is this: how does the
toaster know when to pop the bread and turn o the heating element? Well, it turns out there are at
least three methods. One method is simply to use a timer and pop the bread after a prede ned interval.
One might consider this to be open-loop control, as there really is no feedback involved. Another
method is to actually measure the surface temperature of the bread using a thermocouple: two strips of
di erent metals bonded together, so that when they are heated or chilled they strain at di ering rates
and thus cause a bending motion that can be used to trigger a physical mechanism to turn o the toaster.

A car's cruise control: those of you who drive at least on occasion have probably used one of these
devices to maintain a constant speed on a highway. The main state variable for this control system is the
speed of the car, which is usually measured through the speedometer (which is usually in turn
connected to a Hall E ect sensor that measures the RPM of the drive shaft). More modern systems may
use an inclinometer to account for the e ect of hilly roads and the amount of power required to maintain
a constant speed. The actuation mechanism is the vehicle's throttle. The simplest control law is often a
PID (proportional-integral- derivative) controller on the error signal, de ned as the set point (or
reference) speed minus the measured speed. There are a couple drawbacks associated with this setup.
One of these is that the sensing mechanism assumes perfect traction between the tires and the road,
which is often not the case during a South Bend winter and may under certain circumstances actually
cause instability. The speed measurements are usually a ected by tire pressure, introducing
measurement uncertainty. A tuned PID controller will also assume a typical mass of the vehicle; the
actual value will of course depend on its passengers, cargo, fuel level, the foot of snow you were too lazy
to shovel o the roof, etc. The actual mass will a ect damping, overshoot, and other characteristics of the
controller performance.
(c) (12 points) Thermostat: another simple system is a basic forced-air heating sys- tem. A central
thermostat measures the room temperature: this is the sensing mechanism. The controller then
compares that value to the reference temperature (set point), and then if the di erence is larger than a
threshold value the furnace and blower are turned on. This is another example of a bang-bang (on/o )
con- troller. These systems often have a fair amount of oscillation, due in large part to not simply the
on/o nature of the controller, but the relatively high thermal inertia of both air and objects in the rooms
being heated.
(d) (12 points) Yaw damper on an aircraft. Lying along the approach vector to South Bend airport, few
days go by when an aircraft will not be heard above Notre Dame's campus. While most aircraft are
designed to be open-loop stable with good handling qualities, many con gurations bene t from stability
augmen- tation. One extremely common device used for stability augmentation is the yaw damper.
Laptop temperature regulator. Unless your laptop is exceptionally thermally ecient and can be passively
cooled, you likely have an internal cooling fan to regulate temperature. Typically, a laptop will have
temperature sensors on the central processing unit, graphics processor, memory chips, and sometimes
the north bridge/south bridge chips. The fan will be situated to cool all of these devices. The control law
varies; sometimes it is a lookup table based on the temperature of each component, sometimes it is
continuous based on a PID setup with the highest temperature as an input and the fan speed as an
output. Computer cooling typi- cally has a two-tiered approach: a heat sink is thermally bonded to each
processing core to passively distribute heat, and then a fan is used to cool the heatsink rather than the
core directly. Depending on the location of the temperature sensor, a large temperature gradient could
be present in the heatsink, resulting in locally high tem- peratures in the core that could cause device
latchup. Lookup-table approaches are often better than PID approaches since the thermal inertias of
various components can be taken into account to better regulate the core temperatures as a function of
computational load