Abstract—Control system Teaching in new era is quite
challenging, because many control concepts are formulated in
the form of mathematics. In this paper, LEGO Mindstorms
NXT connected with MATLAB/Simulink is introduced to assist
the control system teaching. Lego Mindstorms NXT builds a
mobile robot which includes two servomotors and one infrared
light sensor. PID controller is designed in MATLAB/Simulink to
achieve the line tracking of the mobile robot. Using the
Ziegler-Nichols method, three key coefficients (proportional,
integral and derivative) are tuned to get optimal control. The
performance of PID controller has been validated by a series of
experiments at different designed trajectories. Using the
proposed method, the students can analyze and test the PID
controller conveniently. These methods can also be extended to
other similar courses.
Index Terms—LEGO Mindstorms NXT, line tracking,
MATLAB/SIMULINK, PID control.
The authors are with School of Electrical and Information Engineering,
Jiangsu University , Zhenjiang, 212013 China (corresponding author,
Tianhong Pan; e-mail: thpan@ujs.edu.cn).
Cite: Jiali Ding, Zhengming Li, and Tianhong Pan, "Control System Teaching and Experiment Using LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Robot," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 309-313, 2017.