This year for the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) is sponsoring a contest at WE11 (their annual conference) called the Mosaic of Memories Quilt. Each contestant was asked to submit an essay and a 6" x 6" quilt square illustrating their point of view as an engineer or SWE member. Each submission will be judged at this year's conference and the completed quilt will be on display at WE12. I was inspired to take advantage of the change to combine my crafty side with my engineering side.

Controls are my passion, which started during my first class at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. I took all of the controls classes offered, which led to my first full time job designing control laws for the Automatic Flight Control System at Rockwell Collins.While working, I pursued a Masters degree at Iowa State University and researched controls.My next goal is to continue my education, earn a PhD, and then teach controls to the next generation.

The first control law I learned how to model was a Proportional (P), Integral (I), and Derivative (D) design. The pink block labeled with a P corresponds to a proportional gain on the error signal, the I block is a gain times the integral of the error, and the D block corresponds to a gain times the derivative of the error. The pink block labeled with “SYS” is the system under control.The buttons represent summation points. The first button creates an error signal by subtracting the feedback from the reference. The second summation adds all of the control terms to input to the system being controlled.