Modern Control Principles and Applications

This book is intended for those who wish to obtain a reasonably detailed working knowledge of the pertinent modern theories of control without wading through the myriad of publications in the field. It also is intended for those who wish to apply these theories to concrete problems. There is currently an impression that in order to appreciate some of the newer control theories, one must be steeped in certain modern branches of mathematics. This is true only to a degree. There is, generally speaking, no substitute for a thorough and deep mathematical grounding. Nevertheless, we feel that the essence of these theories can be imparted without wallowing in the jargon of the mathematics. We try to avoid lengthy chapters on set theory, linear vector spaces, and the like. Instead, we introduce most of the needed mathematics in the text proper, in order to indicate the exact part that the mathematics plays relative to the given problems. Thus our presentation is made in such a way that plausibility arguments generally accompany the mathematical detail..This book is aimed at 1st yr graduate students and qualified undergraduates. It is also intended for the large class of working engineers who wish to keep abreast of the development in modern control theory.. The book covers what to us are the two most important areas of automatic control: stability and performance. It is a universal fact that, if the loop gain is sufficiently high, a closed-loop system can become unstable even without input. When all the system components are essentially operating in their linear ranges, there is a relatively clear understanding of the conditions for instability. This is, however, not the case for nonlinear systems. The extent that modern theories can allow us to determine stability in certain classes of nonlinear systems is a chief topic of the text...