Control and systems

The University of Sheffield has launched an MSc in advanced control and systems engineering (with industry). "The new course is a mix of theory, practice and research and covers subjects from the foundations of control and systems through to advanced concepts and applications. It also has the added benefit of a placement in industry to allow you to put your knowledge and experience into practice to solve challenging problems within an engineering environment," says Simon Pope, course leader.
The Curriculum
The core modules are designed to impart basic skills one needs to be a control and systems engineer. These include areas such as foundations of control systems, state-space, optimal control and non-linear systems, signal processing and estimation, embedded systems and hardware-in-the-loop design, robotics and autonomous systems.The optional modules include advanced industrial control or intelligent and vision systems, multi-sensor and decision systems or non-linear and hybrid systems.
"Students will also take advanced modules in current areas of interest and they are required to put those concepts into practice. We will train them in research methods and they will undertake an extended research project, with a dissertation," explains Pope. In addition to academic staff, there are visiting staff from a range of other institutions. "We work closely with industrial partners such as Rolls-Royce, Jaguar Land-Rover, Boeing and BAE Systems. RollsRoyce has a Research Centre at the department and uses our expertise for finding new solutions for today's challenges, with a focus on a range of areas including gas turbine engines," elaborates Pope.