Advice to the Student

Control co-design is learned by moving repeatedly between physical reasoning, mathematical formulation, computation, and design interpretation. Do not treat the optimization solver as a black box.

For each chapter:

1. identify the physical and control decisions before reading the formulation;

2. predict the important coupling mechanisms;

3. reproduce the worked example in Python or MATLAB;

4. check units, constraints, scaling, and numerical convergence;

5. explain why the optimized design changed; and

6. test the result under conditions that were not optimized.

The activities and exercises are part of the course narrative. A converged optimization is only the beginning of the engineering argument.