I was introduced to MATLAB during my second year at Cal Poly, and have been a fan ever since. I've used to MATLAB to perform matrix operations, to plot experimental data, to do image processing, model and run the controller for hydraulic systems, any for many other applications. Below is a sampling of some of the things I've done.
ME 236 Gait Moments Lab
In this lab I was given an excel file with the position of the joints of a subject walking by a camera, as well as force data from pressure transducers the subject was stepping on. With this data I was able to find the moments felt at the different joints from the force of the steps, and provide an animation of the recorded gait, shown below
Sequence of animations created in Gait Moments Lab. The source code can be found here.
Note that the pauses whenever a foot strikes the ground in the first two animations are intentional as part of the assignment. Also note the force vectors that appear in the first two animations scale with the magnitude of the force recorded.
ME 236 Image Processing Lab
In this lab we processed all the still images from the video below of a bike rider and converted them
Video analyzed to find kinematics of pedaling motion.
into black and white images like shown below, from which the 2 white dots could be extracted, tracked and the kinematics of the pedaling motion plotted.
Example of frame simplified to black and white. From here regions that were too large or too small were rejected, and the image searched for white regions that were near circular. The centroidal location of these regions was then stored as the kinematic data for the cyclists legs.
ME 422 Motor Controller Simulink Model
In the controls class at Cal Poly extensive use of Simulink was used to model the different systems studied. Below is a closed loop model of the motor controller used in lab. The top loop is without a dead zone, the bottom loop includes dead zone compensation.
Simulink model of a motor controller.
In some labs we were able to use Simulink to control the system, not just model it, and optimize our gains to achieve the desired response.