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A First Course on CPS
Walid Taha, Robert Cartwright, Roland Philippsen, Yingfu Zeng Halmstad University and Rice University

The Big Picture
Goal: A CPS appreciation course for ● B.A. and B.Sc. programs at Rice and Halmstad
○ Several Departments

● M.Sc. programs ● PhD students First step: Halmstad's M.Sc. in Emb. & Intel. Sys. ● 2 year program (1.5 courses, 0.5 thesis) ● diverse, international student body ● graduates work in Sweden and abroad

Technical Contents

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

What is CPS? Modeling Physical Systems Hybrid Systems Control Modeling Computational Systems Communications Single-Link Robot (case study) Multi-Agent Systems

Approach

● ● ● ● ● ●

Lectures Labs (Acumen, our free SW tool) Reading (Notes free online) Homeworks Final exam Course project (free tool)
○ Design a Ping Pong playing robot ○ Design by iterative refinement ○ Three tournaments during the term

Feedback on First Offering
● "it was fun to run the design" ● "support for 3D visualization was very useful" ● requests for "more intermediate exercises"
○ improved in 2nd offering

● "the current project is difficult enough" ● "too much reading on something easy"
○ improved in 2nd offering

Overall Student Satisfaction ● 5 on a scale from 1 (worst) to 6 (best)

Feedback on Second Offering
Working:
○ lecturing style: whiteboard, no slides, interactive, conversational ○ open access course material ○ collaborative real-time note taking

Needs work:
○ gap between lectures and assignments: need more progressive levels of difficulty ○ some open-ended problems are too big and difficult ○ chapter on communication "is too abstract"

Conclusions
Teachers and students are happy ● It will become a required first-year course for EIS Master Program at Halmstad University The takeaway ● Course content (largely stable and) works ● Acumen provides "language" and "virtual lab"
○ interactive IDE ○ animated 3D visualization

● "Tournament" project (mostly) works

For More Information

http://bit.ly/CPS-course