Modern Control Systems [antikvár]

PREFACE Automation and robotics are critical ingredients in the world's efforts toward an improved standard of living for all. Automation, the automatic operation of processes, and robotics, which includes the manipulator, controller, and associated devices, are all critical to effective operation of our plants, factories, and institutions. The most important and productive approach to learning is for the reader to rediscover and recreate anew the answers and methods of the past. Thus the ideal is to present the student with a series of problems and questions and point to some of the answers that have been obtained over the past decades. The traditional method, to confront the student not with the problem but with the finished solution, is to deprive the student of all excitement, to shut off the creative impulse, to reduce the adventure of humankind to a dusty heap of theorems. The issue, then, is to present some of the unanswered and important problems which we continue to confront. For it may be asserted that what we have truly learned and understood we discovered ourselves. The purpose of this book is to present the structure of feedback control theory and to provide a sequence of exciting discoveries as the reader proceeds through the text and problems. In that this book is able to assist the student in discovering feedback control system theory and practice, it will have succeeded. The book is organized around the concepts of control system theory as they have been developed in the frequency- and time-domain. A real attempt has been made to make the selection of topics, as well as the systems discussed in the examples and problems, modern in the best sense. Therefore we have provided a discussion of sensitivity, performance indices, state variables, robotics, and computer control systems, to name a few. However, a valiant attempt has been made to retain the classical topics of control theory which have proved to be so very useful in practice. The text is written in an integrated form so that it should be read from the first to the last chapter. However, it is not necessary to include all the sections of