Blog 7: Expressing Gratitude

Over the past month, I have been gathering parts to build the physical plant. In engineering, many unforeseeable things can happen, like not paying attention to the dimensions of screws and products not living up to advertisements, which wastes time waiting for the parts to be reordered. Also, sometimes there simply isn’t a premade part that fits my needs, in which case I have to spend even more time designing and waiting for them to be machined. All in all, I’m trying to get to the point that I don’t want to bore you with the details of my arduous journey buying components. The plant is almost ready, and the numbers I generated in Simscape should be accurate enough to make it work. 

As the project slowly but surely approaches its end, I want to take some time away from the hardware and software and instead talk about some of the people involved. In this blog, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my correspondent at the University of Victoria, Yang Shi, PhD, for his help in making this project a reality.

Recently elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Dr. Shi is among the most knowledgeable individuals worldwide on Control Systems. It was learning from his works that I first got into the world of Control. In fact, he was the one who inspired me to tackle this project.

Long-time family friend, Dr. Shi, was eager to help as soon as he heard about my project. He provided me with the foundational materials on LQR and LQI, and helped me verify solutions along the way. Although I said in my blog that I learned Simscape on my own, I’ll have to admit I couldn’t have done it without the materials he provided.

Thank you, Dr. Shi. Without you, I wouldn’t even know where to start this project, let alone advancing it this far.