Presenting the basic tools of modern control theory for design, simulation and actual control implementation, the main goal of the book is to show how to implement controllers and estimators on actual systems. Prerequisites for the book, which was designed for a first-year graduate course as well as a handbook for practicing engineers, involve only a certain familiarity with classical control theory and ordinary differential equations; some basic knowledge of matrix algebra and probability theory is summarized in the appendix.
The book contains the following parts: Part I provides an introduction to modern control theory. While in Chapter I the history and philosophy of automatic control is outlined, where a main objective is to compare classical control theory and modern control theory, in Chapter 2 a review of state-variable systems is given. Part II contains the foundations of continuous-time control systems, where Chapter 3 covers the foundations of standard continuous-time control using state-variable feedback, and Chapter 4 shows how to design practical control systems using output- feedback design. Digital control design — the main topic of this book - – is introduced in Part III. In the “Continuous Redesign Approach” of Chapter 5 it is shown how an existing continuous-time controller can be sampled and converted into a digital controller. The second design technique “Direct Discrete Design Approach”, which yields a more accurate performance and greater insight, is described in Chapter 7. Practical implementation aspects like actuator saturation, quantization, overflow, and controller realization are treated in Chapter 6. Frequency- domain techniques for multi-input/multi-output systems and their application to the examination of the closed-loop robustness to disturbances and inexact knowledge of the plant are treated in Chapter 8 representing Part IV. The subject of the final Part V is the recovery of information from incomplete or noisy measurements. Chapter 9 considers the design of estimators and observers that use only available measurements to provide the information necessary for control; furthermore, the Kalman filter is introduced, and its actual implementation on a digital signal processor is illustrated. The design of multivariable dynamic compensators using the linear-quadratic-Gaussian approach is treated in Chapter 10.
This well written book, containing many worked examples, tables and figures, many problems for the student and a considerable list of references can be highly recommended to students and engineers working in the field of applied digital control.