Control Engineering Solutions: A Practical Approach (Control, Robotics and Sensors)

This book collects together in one volume a number of control engineering solutions, intended to be representative of solutions applicable to a broad class of control problems, and outlines possible alternative approaches to finding them. This is neither a control theory book nor a handbook of laboratory experiments, although it includes both the basic theory of control and practical laboratory set-ups to illustrate the solutions proposed.

A number of control problems are identified and discussed, from the initial phase of experimental construction of a model of the process to the final steps of hardware and software implementation, for several illustrative applications including a motor drive and a small scale robot. PID tuning and anti-wind-up, disturbance rejection, time delays and distributed systems, state feedback and observer design, multiloop interaction, fault detection and supervision, and fuzzy logic control are some of the control issues treated.

Written by a team of European experts, the book should interest a broad audience. Control engineering students will find potential applications for control theory and workable examples of practical control problems. Most of the laboratory set-ups will be easy to replicate by control engineering teaching staff, enabling practical activity to complement theoretical and exercise class sessions. Applied control engineers will find guidelines to approach the solution of their own control problems, including discussion of alternative methods and results to be expected. The publication of this book represents the final outcome of a European TEMPUS project to improve educational practice in automation and control technology.

Pedro Albertos received his PhD from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid in 1973 and since 1977 has been Professor of Systems and Control Engineering in the Department of Systems Engineering, Computers and Control at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia. He is the coeditor of two other books and author of numerous book chapters and journal papers on digital control, adaptive control, learning control systems and applications in the process industry. He is a Visiting Professor in many universities worldwide, a senior member of IEEE and is President-Elect of IFAC (appointed to organise the XV IFAC World Congress in Spain in 2002).

Roland Strietzel received his Drlng and Drlng Habil degrees from the Dresden University of Technology where he has worked since 1962. He is now a Professor of control engineering and has more than 100 scientific publications to his name. His main area of research is control of continuous processes and fuzzy control. He is a member of the European Union Control Association and of the Working Party on Engineering Industries and Automation of the ECE.

Neil Mort received his PhD from the University of Sheffield in 1983 while serving as an Instructor Officer in the Royal Navy. He left the RN in 1988 to take up a lecturing position at Sheffield where he is now a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering. His academic interests range from simulation and control of manufacturing systems to the use of neural networks for meteorological and financial time series prediction. He is a strong advocate of international cooperation in both research and teaching activities in the field of control and systems engineering.