Bruce A. Francis – författare

Among the many techniques for designing linear multivariable analogue controllers, the two most popular optimal ones are H2 and H-infinity optimization. The fact that most new industrial controllers are digital provides strong motivation for adapting or extending these techniques to digital control systems. This book, now available as a corrected reprint, attempts to do so. Part I presents two indirect methods of sampled-data controller design: These approaches include approximations to a real problem, which involves an analogue plant, continuous-time performance specifications, and a sampled-data controller. Part II proposes a direct attack in the continuous-time domain, where sampled-data systems are time-varying. The findings are presented in forms that can readily be programmed in, e.g., MATLAB.

Robust control originates with the need to cope with systems with modeling uncertainty. There have been several mathematical techniques developed for robust control system analysis. The articles in this volume cover all of the major research directions in the field.

This brief describes the coordinated control of groups of robots using only sensory input – and no direct external commands. Furthermore, each robot employs the same local strategy, i.e., there are no leaders, and the text also deals with decentralized control, allowing for cases in which no single robot can sense all the others.One can get intuition for the problem from the natural world, for example, flocking birds.How do they achieve and maintain their flying formation?Recognizing their importance as the most basic coordination tasks for mobile robot networks, the brief details flocking and rendezvous. They are shown to be physical illustrations of emergent behaviors with global consensus arising from local interactions. The authors extend the consideration of these fundamental ideas to describe their operation in flying robots and prompt readers to pursue further research in the field.  Flocking and Rendezvous in Distributed Robotics will provide graduate students a firm grounding in the subject, while also offering an authoritative reference work for more experienced workers seeking a brief but thorough treatment of an area that has rapidly gained in interest.

This volume is the proceedings of a conference held May 6 and 7, 1994 at McGill University in Montreal in honour of Professor George on the occasion of his 60th birthday. He has devoted most of his professional life to the subject of feedback control.Invited speakers were internationally prominent researchers from the USA, Canada, UK and the Netherlands. Their papers cover various aspects of linear multivariable feedback control, nonlinear systems and the complexity of systems.

This is a collection of articles by friends, co-authors, colleagues, and students of Keith Glover, Professor of Engineering at the University of Cambridge, on the occasion of his 60th birthday. Professor Glover's work spans a variety of topics, including system identification, model reduction and approximation, robust controller synthesis, and control of aircraft and engines. The collection is a tribute to Professor Glover's seminal work in these areas.