IFAC Newsletter – August 2026
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Build, Control and Fly: Mini-drone Activities
The project aims to engage a diverse range of young people in interactive learning experiences with a focus on control engineering. High-school students will have the opportunity to explore, construct, program, and operate small aerial drones in the form of a hands-on workshop. In addition, captivating drone flight demonstrations will be conducted to educate the broader public.
Empowering Tomorrow’s Innovators: Unleashing the Potential of Girls in Control Engineering in South Africa
Three control face-to-face workshops have been conducted since 2022 in the Zululand region for 138 girls from three primary schools aged 9 to 15 years. This project will support additional workshops for girls, in Zululand and other parts of the country.
Teaching Analytics: a feedback control approach to aid student self-assessment in higher education.
The project Teaching Analytics: a feedback control approach to aid student self-assessment in higher education focuses on developing an open web platform to help teachers share assessment materials globally. Teachers can upload, categorize, and search for exam questions in standard LaTeX format. Students can answer these questions online to track their learning progress through personalized concept maps.
Zoom Workshop Series on Control Systems and Data Science towards Industry 4.0
This workshop series highlights the integration of control systems theory, data science, and machine learning to advance Industry 4.0 applications. Organized by S. Joe Qin from the City University of Hong Kong, the three-module online event brought together global experts and industry leaders. It covered key topics including predictive analytics, process automation in chemical and biological engineering, and machine learning for electrical systems.
Development of an interactive wave energy exhibition tank to demonstrate energy-maximising control
This project resulted in the design and construction of an interactive wave energy demonstration tank. The equipment shows the importance of control in the efficient conversion of wave energy, while highlighting the benefits of renewable sources of energy to diverse audiences, including the non-technical public and other technical disciplines.
Pocket-Sized Portable Labs: Control Engineering Practice Made Easy
Pocket-Sized Portable Labs: Control Engineering Practice Made Easy demonstrates how simple experiments using compact, microcontroller-based kits like Arduino and Raspberry Pi can inspire students to study control engineering. Organized under the Portuguese Association for Automatic Control and led by Paulo Moura Oliveira, the project utilized the Temperature Control Laboratory (TCLab) kit to bring hands-on learning into classrooms and homes during the COVID-19 pandemic.
CTRL+ESC: Control Theory Escape Room Development at TU Berlin
To help introduce control engineering and its underlying principles to the general public, this project created a fun, engaging and accessible way of learning about and being exposed to control engineering by developing a suitable “escape room” for the general public, which consists of a set of puzzles, located in a room (or a collection of rooms), in which participants enter and must solve the puzzles in order to leave the room or get to the next room.
Female Historical Influencers in Automatic Control – Part 3
Women are generally a minority in control. Role models are key when attracting diverse groups.
‘Empowering Tomorrow’s Innovators’: Unleashing the Potential of Girls in Control Engineering in South Africa
This project aims to create awareness of automation and control among 9 to15-year-old girls at rural and urban schools in South Africa as part of STEM education.
Build, Control and Fly: Mini Drone Activities
This project aimed to design a series of activities to engage a diverse range of young people in hands-on learning with a focus on mathematics, physics, and programming of drones in a controlled lab environment. The target audience for the workshop was GCSE (age:14-16 years) and A-level (Age:16-18 years) students.
Graduate School on Advanced Sliding Mode Control
The graduate school on advanced sliding mode control was proposed at the Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur, India, from 5-10 December 2024. The main aim of this school was to promote the role of control engineering, especially the sliding mode technique, among young researchers and students to encourage them to pursue a career in control systems.
The Control Engineering Exercises Journal – IT infrastructure costs for the startup period
We are piloting a mechanism aimed at promoting the sharing of open-access control education resources. This initiative revolves around a journal-like publication of conceptual exercises accompanied by their solutions.
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