Recent years have witnessed a rapid development of active control of various mechanical systems. With increasingly strict requirements for control speed and system performance, the unavoidable time delays in both controllers and actuators have become a serious problem. For instance, all digital controllers, analogue anti aliasing and reconstruction filters exhibit a certain time delay during operation, and the hydraulic actuators and human being interaction usually show even more significant time delays. These time delays, albeit very short in most cases, often deteriorate the control performance or even cause the instability of the system, be cause the actuators may feed energy at the moment when the system does not need it. Thus, the effect of time delays on the system performance has drawn much at tention in the design of robots, active vehicle suspensions, active tendons for tall buildings, as well as the controlled vibro-impact systems. On the other hand, the properly designed delay control may improve the performance of dynamic sys tems. For instance, the delayed state feedback has found its applications to the design of dynamic absorbers, the linearization of nonlinear systems, the control of chaotic oscillators, etc. Most controlled mechanical systems with time delays can be modeled as the dynamic systems described by a set of ordinary differential equations with time delays.
