What is Control?

When we use the word control in everyday life, we are referring to the act of
producing a desired result.

Automatic Control
The temperature inside a refrigerator is controlled by a thermostat.
The picture we see on the television is a result of a controlled beam of electrons
made to scan the television screen in a selected pattern.
A compact-disc player focuses a fine laser beam at the desired spot on the
rotating compact-disc in order to produce the desired music.

Manual Control
The driver is controlling the speed and direction of the car so as to reach the
destination quickly, without hitting anything on the way.

The list is endless.

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 A study of control involves developing a mathematical model for each component
of the control system.

A system is a set of self-contained processes under study.

A control system by definition consists of the system to be controlled - called the

plant - as well as the system which exercises control over the plant, called the
controller.

The controller is said to supply a signal to the plant, called the input to the plant
(or the control input), in order to produce a desired response from the plant,
called the output from the plant.

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 Open-Loop and Closed-Loop
Control Systems

a control system, in which the control input is applied without the knowledge of
the plant output, is called an open-loop control system.
Figure 1.1 shows a block-diagram of an open-loop control system, where the
sub-systems (controller and plant) are shown as rectangular blocks, with arrows
indicating input and output to each block.

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 open-loop control will be successful only if the controller has a pretty good prior
knowledge of the behavior of the plant, which can be defined as the relationship
between the control input and the plant output.

In a closed-loop system the controller is constantly in touch with the

actual output, it is likely to succeed in achieving the desired output even in the
presence of noise and/or uncertainty in the linear plant's behavior (transfer-
function)

A block-diagram example of a possible closed-loop system is given in Figure

1.2.

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 Figure 1.3 shows a possible plot of the actual output of a closed-loop control
system.

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 While the most common closed-loop control system is the feedback control
system, as shown in Figure 1.2, there are other possibilities such as the
feedforward control system. In a feedforward control system - whose
example is shown in Figure 1.4

a feedforward path from the desired output (yd) to the control input is generally
employed to counteract the effect of noise, or to reduce a known undesirable
plant behavior.
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 Other Classifications of Control
Systems

Apart from being open- or closed-loop, a control system can be classified

according to the physical nature of the laws obeyed by the system, and the
mathematical nature of the governing differential equations.

To understand such classifications, we must define the state of a system, which is

the fundamental concept in modern control.
The state is all the information we need about a system to tell what the system is
doing at any given time.

A control system is said to be deterministic when the set of physical laws

governing the system are such that if the state of the system at some time (called
the initial conditions) and the input are specified, then one can precisely predict
the state at a later time.

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 A system that is not deterministic is either stochastic, or has no laws governing it.

A stochastic (also called probabilistic) system has such governing laws that
although the initial conditions (i.e. state of a system at some time) are known in
every detail, it is impossible to determine the system's state at a later time.

In other words, based upon the stochastic governing laws and the initial
conditions, one could only determine the probability of a state, rather than the
state itself.
We should, however, make a distinction between a physically stochastic system,
and our ability (as humans) to predict the behavior of a deterministic system
based upon our measurement of the initial conditions and our understanding of
the governing laws.

Due to an uncertainty in our knowledge of the governing deterministic laws, as

well as errors in measuring the initial conditions, we will frequently be unable to
predict the state of a deterministic system at a later time.

Such a problem of unpredictability is highlighted by a special class of

deterministic systems, namely chaotic systems.

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 A system is called chaotic if even a small change in the initial conditions produces
an arbitrarily large change in the system's state at a later time.

An example of chaotic control systems is a double pendulum (Figure 1.5).

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 Figure 1.6 shows the time history of the angle Ө2(t) between 85 s and 100 s

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 Depending upon whether the differential equations used to describe a control
system are linear or nonlinear in nature, we can call the system either linear or
nonlinear.

Furthermore, a control system whose description requires partial differential

equations is called a distributed parameter system, whereas a system requiring
only ordinary differential equations is called a lumped parameter system.

A vibrating string, or a membrane is a distributed parameter system, because its

properties (mass and stiffness) are distributed in space.
A mass suspended by a spring is a lumped parameter system, because its mass
and stiffness are concentrated at discrete points in space.

A particular system can be treated as linear, or nonlinear, distributed, or lumped

parameter, depending upon what aspects of its behavior we are interested in.

another way of classifying control systems is whether their outputs are

continuous
or discontinuous in time.

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 Control System Design Process

1. Establish control goals

2. Identify the variables to control

3. Write the specifications for the variables

4. Establish the system configuration and identify the actuator

If the performance does not 5. Obtain a model of the process, the actuator and the sensor
meet specifications, then
iterate the configuration and
actuator
6. Describe a controller and select key parameters to be adjusted

7. Optimize the parameters and analyze the performance

If the performance meet the specifications, then finalize design

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 Examples of Modern Control Systems

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 Design Example

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 Design Example

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